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22 1

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^'JH^Mf^f' ^^'^

: io

I <i

SANTA BARBARA.

SANTA BARBARA

OUIDA

AUTHOR OP "UNO.J. TWO rLACS." '« STRATHMORB." -TWO L.TTL. WOOD«.
.H0«," "PUCK." .'MOTHS." - rou.. ;aR,NB." .^^

iWomreal;

JOHN LOVELL & SON.

1891.

^2.

NOTE,

With the exception of ^' Santa Barbara^ which was

written for '^Les Lettres et les Arts,'' all the stories in

this volume are now printed and published for the first
time.

C0NTENTC5.

n -r, ''AGE

Santa Barbara,

• • 7

POUSSETTE,

RiNALDO, ,

• • lOI

The Halt,

181

The Stable-Boy.

' • .203

La Rossiccia, .

' 237

ill

The
I novels

Ouida

iidna

Florei]

C9ii

I from w]
[others i

Thei

AH t
[to who
I their pu

Fors

LOVELll'S^

CANADIAN COPYRIGHT SERIES

OF onoioE FioTionsa

The Series now numbers over 60 books, and contains the latest
novels of such well-known authors as '

Ouida, The Duchess, Geo. ManvUle Penn, ^

Bosa Nouchette Caj-ey, Florence Mairyat,

A. Conan Doyle, Georg Ebers, James Payn,

Sdna T xraii ir-.u ^ ^J^^^^. Prank Barrett, Mrs. Alexander,
«dna LyaU, Kathenne S. Maoquoid, a M. Robins, *~*"«'^»

Q- A. Henty, Adeline Sergeant, Mona Caird,
John Strange Winter, Joseph Hatton,
Dora Russell, Julian Sturgis,
Florence Warden, Annie Thomas, ^*^ Tannatt Woods,

W. B. Norris, Helen Mathers,

Jessie Pothergill, Hall Caine,

Oswald Crawftird, Rhoda Broughton,

r«iia«i^- «ui_ -. ^ ^ ^'^' P*ii"iPs, Robert Buchanan.
CharlM Gibbon, L. T. Meade, John Berwick Harwood,

[from whose pens books have been issued during the past year, and
others now m preparation, make the Series the best in the Dominion.
The books are printed on good paper with new type.
AH the books are published by arrangement with the authors
to whom a royalty is paid, and are issued simultaneously with
j their publication in Eogland. ^

For sale at all Bookstores.

JOHN LOVELI J?. QHM
MONTREAL

m^r-

•it-

H. VE you used Covernton's Celebrated

FRAGRANT CARBOLIC TOOTH WASH

Of th- City. Pnce, 25c., 500. and $1.00 a bottle. ^°'****

COVERNTON'S SYRUP OF WILD CHERRY
For Coughi, Colds, Asthma, Bronchitis, etc. Price as<^

COVERNTON'S AROMATIC BUCKBERRY
CARMINATIVE,

^ I>iarrhoea, Cholera Morbus^ Dyscntefy, etc Price 956.

COVERNTON'S NIPPLE OIL

For Cracked or Sore Nipples. Pric«ijc

USE

. COVERNTON'S ALPINE CREAM

«tc. A most delightful preparation for the Toilet. Pri^^

C, J. COYERNTON & CO.

fiff BirilDV ayn MAMA«a«A.«u^ -- .-

^/wwA, ' 469 St Lawnnce Sifwt,
MONTUBMhi

/'tit ; ,i :

■ ^ it'

.Tim

rrHf

^ASH,

^ening the
ig Dentist*

JHERRY^
Price asc
ERRY

Price 8f&.
Pric»g|c^

SANTA BARBARA.

FreeUee^

?ricea<iQ».

in Venice"? """" ^"' '''""=^^'=° ''^"^ V'^"^'
Some say that its tall tower is the first
point rising above the waves, which the re-
turning Venetian sailor sees as he comes
homeward from the southeast, over the foam-
ing bars of Chioggia and Malamocco, one
slender shaft lifted against the sky, calling

him back to his city and his home. All tSf
manners and fishermen, who come and go
over the Adrian waters, have an especial te^!
derness, an especial reverence, for Saint

farTno"' ''' ^'"^^^^•^- There is no vine-
yard now; only one small square garden

• :lel ^'°tr -""'"ground i', archfd. c"-'
umned, marble paved, where the dead «; „„.
der the worn smooth slabs, and the box-edges

l^mJlu T f""^'' ^"^ saxifrage, and other
homely hardy plants which need slight foster-

SANTA BARBARA.

ing care. The sea-winds blow strongly there,
and the sea-fogs drift thickly, and the steam
and smoke of the foundries round about hang
in heavy clouds, where once the pavilions and
the lawns and the terraces of the patricians of
Venice touched the gray-green lagoon ; but
this garden of San Francesco is still sweet
and fresh : shut in between its marble colon-
nades with the deep brown shadow of the
church leaning over it, and the chiming of the
bells, and the melody of the organ rolling
above it in deep wavesof sound, jarred some-
times by the clash of the hammers falling on
the iron and the copper of the foundries near
at hand, and sometimes sinking to a sweet si-
lence, only softly stirred by the splash of an oar
as a boat passes up or down the narrow canal.
For the sake of that cloistered garden, a
gondola came one summer every day to the
landing-place before San Francesco. In the
gondola was an artist, a painter of Paris,
Yvon Dordt, who had seen the spot, and
liked it, and returned to paint from it every
day, finding an inexpressible charm in its con- '
trasts of gloom and light, of high brown walls
and low-lying graves, of fresh green herbs and
flowers, and melancholy immemorial marble
aisles. He meant to make a great picture of

ly there,
le steam
^ut hang
ions and
icians of
on ; but
11 sweet
e colon-
' of the
ig of the

rolling
d some-
lling on
ies near
weet si-
)fanoar
w canal,
rden, a
r to the

In the
* Paris,
)ot, and
t every ^
its con-
n walls
rbs and
marble
:ture of

SANTA BARBARA.

"t. w,ththe ethereal Venetian sky above all
and, between tlie straight ed^es V.f .r k '
a solitary monk passing^LuSuIlv n f'

whicr„ot;s; :" ;r LTiHef t"''-i

these summer months werlto htm T'- '"'^
oflanguor, and beauty and rest ^ I'TT
white wing-s of sea hWA. 1' ! ^^'""^ *''«
p-Ieam.-^ sea-birds, and the silver of

were all blended in tLV ? ** '^S^°°"'

present, of arVlnd „a u^ofT °'P"' ^"'^
pose, which fills the soul ;1 T^ ^""^ •■'^-

those who love Venice id ^ ''u^'^ °^
her. ^' ^"'^ ^'ve m thrall to

pro°ordiran'd°Z ^"°"f '° '^^' ''^^ ^P^"

could feeU't a„dt '"r^'' '° ''^ ^^^^ 'hat he

^cci ic, and to welcome itac: o i;«„ •

breath of youth, as in the heat of th. T""^
mer n ghts he wp1^„ j '"^ midsum-

ing doL i^^TaduTh-^'^^^^^ '''°"'-
stni waters by MtS'" „" p^^^' -^ *e

-us, wearied, feverish, sated " tnl^: ^

SANTA BARBARA,

was a Student still, a pupil still, a lover of all
lovely things, content to sit at the feet of
Titian, and Giorgione ; happy to dream his
days away virhere silver sunlight poured
through a canopy of vine-leaves on a group
of naked children, playing like young dolphins
in green water, or a fleet of boats, red, yel-
low, orange, ruddy as so many flames, glided
by a grassy isle, or ruined marble mole.

In Paris he could not live a day without all
the refinements and ingenuities of what some
call vice, and some call pleasure ; in Venice
he was content merely de s'dcouier vivre,
dreamily, and harmlessly, penetrated with
that divinity of beauty, which is the very life-
blood of the true artist, and that humility
which alone contains the germ of greatness.

" Je me sens si jeune ici," he wrote to a
friend in Paris : *' Je me retrempe corps et
ame dans cet air pur, dans ces eaux ensoleil-
lees. Laissez crier les gueuses et les cabo-
tines, je n'ai pas besoin d'elles ; j'ai la Sainte
Barbara qui se donne ^ moi."

And he had come to the cloister of San
Francesco every morning for a fortnight, to
portray its cool grays, and browns, and
whites, its simple green leaves, its poor lone-
ly monks, he who was wont to enrapture

SANTA BARBARA. ,,

Paris with pictures of nude women and
drunken revellers, and daring visions of
Greek and Egyptian orgies, and scenes of
onental sensuality, and strange landscapes
burning with the scorch of Asia and of Africa.

rasse. The pavement of flat moss-grown
tombs, the shadow of the high church, the
homely fragrant flowers, the peaceful colon-
nades, did they not embody in them, and
symbolize all that the modern world has lost

fa thT"^'' .°^''''"'■;• °f ^'-Pl'-^y. and of
fauh ? He had no faith of any sort, but he

envied those who could still bask in its illu-
sions: and in a solitary house, upon the
dreary moors of Morbihan, with stormy seas
boiling between black rocks and long winters
enshrouding the cruel coasts in mist and
snow, his mother, a lone woman, prayed for
him night and day. All his gr;a't triumpt
had been but as mere terrible forecasts of
of hi ° \ ^"Pejstitious piety, and on none
of his works had her pained eyes borne to
look ; this picture of the past should be paint-
ed for her. he thought, since to her, as to the

g^d a .tiir "" '"" ' ^"""' '"' ''^ '^-

It was the harmonious proportions of i«

SANTA BARBARA.

colonnades and the subdued sweetness of
color in its garden which had first drawn
him there : of its symbolism he had only
thought later, one day when the chanting of
the lays within the church had come to his
ear ; they had been singing from a mass of
Palestrina's. It is only in the old obscure
Ichurches of old historic towns that one can
(still hear all the beautiful music of the old
masters, whose scores lie dust-covered, yel-
low, and moth-eaten, in organ-lofts and sacris-
ties, their melody left mute and neglected be-
tween the leaves, while the world runs after
braying chords and borrowed motives wh'ich
have dethroned melody.

It was August, and August is very warm
in Venice ; all that wide shadeless plain of
shallow rippling sea draws down and reflects
tenfold the sun, as in a mirror, and there is
no retreat from the heat except inside the
water-gates of the palaces or behind the
leathern curtains of the churches; out of
doors, everywhere, even under the deep vault
of the Rialto bridge or under the drooping
trees of San Trovasic the strong heat pene-
trates ; and here in the cloister of Saint Fran-
cis at noonday Dor At, who had ceased to
paint because the light was too strong, and

'I' .

ess of

drawn

d only

ing of

to his

ass of

>bscure

le can

he old

d, yel-

sacris-

:ed be-

s after

which

warm
ain of
eflects
lere is
ie the
id the
)ut of
3 vault
Doping
pene-
Frasi-
jed to
g, and

SANTA BARBARA.

who was unwilling to leave the place as yet
felt his eyelids grow heavy and his hand be-
come slow to obey him.

All things invited to repose; the cool mar-
ble parapet of the cloisters, the drowsy hum
of the bees rifling the stocks and carnations
the monotonous chant of the choristers re^
peatmg their lesson, the silence which pre-
vailed everywhere else, for at midday the
foundry hammers ceased ; and Dorat, resist-
ing his indolent impulses but a moment,
strolled to the cloister on his left, and threw
himself down on the marble ledge in the
shadow. There he in another moment fell
asleep, the hum of the bees and the hymn of
the choristers lulling him to slumber as a
song sung low lulls a child. Soon the chant-
ing ceased, and all was completely still.
1 here was no sound except his own even
breathing and the buzzing of the bees in the
httle garden ; the monks were mumbling over
their midday fish and bread in their refectory
the sun poured down on the brown brick wall
of the church, and the flowers drooped under
the strength of its rays. Dor^t slept on un-
disturbed, his head on his arm, his limbs out-
stretched, his head, handsome as the Anti-
nous of Canova, his face pale from the habits

SANTA BARBARA,

oi \\u life, his slender ant? graceful limbs in-
dolently posed as he dreamed on in complete
unconsciousness.

From a crevice in the marble beneath him
a little head peeped out, and a darksome form
crept toward him ; not the gay green inno-
cent frolicksome shape of the lizard, but the
wicked black head of an adder. In these old
walls all manner of poisonous as of harmless
creatures dwell, and no seat or couch is more
dangerous than the rest which an old wall
in Italy offers to the tired and thoughtless
traveller.

All snakes, large and small, love the noon
sun ; and this adder came out after the man-
ner of her kind allured by the basking heat.
Did she know what she did, or did she not
know ? Who can tell ? Man knows what
he does when he slays ;- but these others —
who can say that they know what they do
though often they are wiser than we ? 'S)h^
looked out of her hole and enjoyed the great
heat which fell on her flat pointed head ; and
then i '^'^ emerged more fully into the light,
and saw at hr*rid of a man which hung down
over the 1 d^-e of mrrble and lay idly on the
ground ; the slender supple delicate hand of
the artist which creates beautiful things and

SAJfTA BARBARA. ,-

has power in all its fingers to call up visible
scenes from worlds unseen by his fellows.
1 hen It seemed good to the adder to touch
th.s hand, and she crept close to it on her
belly and wound herself carefully round it
and upward to the wrist. But her touch and
her clasp were so light that the sleeper did
not awaken, and she drew her head back as
a chdd recoils before making a leap, and
darted her tongue out like a little arrow of
death, and showed her double range of fine
small teeth like pins.

But before those teeth could reach and
penetrate the flesh, another hand seized her
by the throat, gripping her so tightly that she
could not move, and threw her on the ground
and then with a stone killed her. The noise
of the stone falhng on the marble pavement
awoke Dor.t; he raised himself on his left
arm, and looked with astonished eyes up into
the white warm light above him.

" Santa Barbara ! " he murmured ; for the
woman who stood above him resembled mar-
vel ously that picture which he loved and
wh.ch he had gazed on that morning for the
T^^^yr:^^ - ■'-.^^ in thf shadow
Formosr^ ""'"" '" '"'' """''*''' °^ ^^ ^^"^

^ANTA BARBARA.

" It is bad to sleep upon old walls, they
harbor dangerous beasts," said the woman,
gravely, in the soft liquid Venetian accents.
" See, Signor, I killed her, or very surely she
would have killed you."

" You have done me a service indeed ; I
was asleep and dreaming of Sta Barbara,"
said Dorat ; he was still but half awake, and
he looked dreamily at the little black crushed
adder lying on a slab of discolored marble.
Was it possible ? One touch from that small
creature, one drop of venom from its fangs,
and all the power of his brain and cunning of
his hand might have been dulled and dead
forever!

The idea seemed so strange to him that he
was absorbed by it for a moment. The next
his eyes, still dim and heavy with slumber in
the heat, saw only the face of his saviour, a
face like Sta Barbara's, of the old noble warm-
hued Venetian type, with strength as well as
beauty in its lines, and dusky golden hair,
and a mouth like a carnation. She was a
woman of the people, she had a black shawl
worn over her head as Venetian women so
often wear one ; a linen bodice and a woollen
skirt ; but these poor clothes could not con-
ceal the magnificent lines of her form and the

SANTA BARBARA. ,«

mingled grace and strength of her hmbs;
while her throat and bosom and arms were
those of Veronese's Europa.

"All the types in one ! " he murmured to
himself, feastmg his eyes on this incarnation
of womanhood till the ardor and abstraction
of h.s gaze called up a vivid blush over the

half offended, half diverted, frowned and

aughed and turned away. •' By the Virein

how you stare, 'llustrissima ! " she murmured,'

as she drew her shawl closer about her breast.

the seal" ^°" *" "^ •""" '* ""^^ °^^'-

The homely words recalled DorSt to him-
self; he rose and thanked her warmly for the
serv.ce she had done him, and begged to
know to whom his debt of life was owing

i, 7, /""t^^'""'? ^'"'^'■' ^"<^ "'y husband
IS ^uan fron, she answered. " Yes, Vene-

t.ans both, what else should we be > I live
dose by, in the Campiello dei Merli, where
he well ,s, w.th the marble angels ; they say
|t IS very old, and people come and sketch it
V ou are a painter too .' "

" I am," said Dordt " anri T r^^,.
a_j -. .t .. ':'"''"■' ana i may come

anu sue tne well with the angels > " '

" Surely, it is in the Campo ; it is not mine.

liiiii

ill

SANTA BARBARA,

Anyonie may see it. But why do you lie and
sleep here ? Why are you not at home if you
wish to sleep?"

" The heat overcame me, and but for you
I might have awakened from my siesta only
to sleep forever in the grave. May I ask
how you came here, in a monkish sanctu-
ary ? "

" I came to bring some linen to Cattina,
the sacristan's wife ; and she gave me leave
to gathei^ some lavender ; I often come here ;
the monks say nothing."

*' They would indeed cease to be men if
they could object ! "

The calm deep blue eyes of Veronica
gazed at him without comprehension of the
compliment.

If she seemed Barbara and Europa to him,
he seemed to her a being of another world,
so delicate, so slender, so sweet-voiced, so
unlike the gondoliers and boatmen and sailors
who made up her family and her neighbor-
hood and her v/orld. She stood a moment,
reflecting, in the hot sunlight with her bare
feet on the marble pavement and the tawny
gold of her colled hair burnished in the light.
Then she stooped and nicked un a bundle of
lavender which she had dropped when she

SANTA BARBARA. 31

had seized and stoned the adder, and nodded

ner head in farewell.

" Do not sleep on old walls again," she
said, carelessly ; and turned to leave the
cloister.

J' Wait a moment," murmured Dorat;
tell me where I can find the Campiello."
'• Three turns from here, one to the left
and then two to the right; you cannot miss

II**

"And take this," he added, as he slid his
watch into her hand; "take this, to remind
you that I owe it to your courage and pres-
ence of mmd if time has not wholly ceased to
exist for me."

She took the watch and gazed at it in ad-
miration ; it was a gold chronometer of great
value ; but after looking on it in admiration
lor a moment she gave it back to him

''I want nothing," she said, with some
coldness. "You owe me nothing either;
and It Zuan were to hear that I took pay-
ment for doing my duty he would give me
the rope s end when he came home "

"The brute ! " muttered DorSt, but he did
not force his gift or his presence on her.

. Whl give you some other memorial
of this morning," he said with tender grace

J^ANTA BARBARA.

\i :

as he raised her hand to his hps and kissed
it reverently. That action surprised and
pleased her ; she felt the homage of it and
its difference from the rough wooing of Zuan
Tron.

"Add^!" she said to him, drawing her
hand away : and with her sheaf of lavender
in her arms she went out of the cloister.

Then he let her go, watching her superb
walk as she passed through the garden with
that mingling of poetic analysis and of sen-
sual desire which, together and inseparable,
characterize every artistic temperament.

Dor^t was accustomed to leave his easel
and canvas and colors with the sacristan of
San Francesco ; when he left them there this
day an hour or two later, he questioned the
old man as to the history of Veronica, the
wife of Tron. The man had little to say in
answer ; she was the daughter of Ruffo Ve-
nier, a coppersmith ; Tron was a working
sailor in a coasting brig. They were poor
folks; she was not twenty years old; she
had had one child, it was dead ; she was a
handsome wench, yes, but there were others
as good to look at, and in the Campo the
neighbors thought that she gave herself airs ;
what sort of man was Tron } well enough,'

SANTA BARBARA,

\d kissed
sed and
Df it and
i of Zuan

iring her
lavender
:er.

r superb
len with
of sen-
parable,
nt.

is easel
istan of
lere this
ned the
lica, the
► say in
iffo Ve-
vorking-
re poor
d ; she
was a
others
ipo the
M airs •
nough,

honest, hard-working, good, but violent, and
apt to be jealous ; he had only sailed two
days before with wood for Greece; those
brigs were slow but sure. Then the sacris-
tan pocketed a fee and took in the easel, and
a little later said to his wife that Veronica
had saved a foreigner from an adder's bite.

" More fool she," said his wife ; " we never
do a stroke of good in this world but what it
turns against us and comes and bites us."

" That is true," said the sacristan, washing
Dorat's brushes, - but," he added with a
chuckle, " this adder will be more likelv to
bite Tron." ^

In the afternoon Dor^t walked down the
street of the Merceria, that busy crowded
narrow alley which has some looks and sounds
of the bazaars of the East in its color and
confusion, and entered a jeweller's shop well
known to him ; a dusky den where gold and
silver, coral and agate, pearls and diamonds,
and all kinds of filagree work in precious
metals shone and gleamed in the deep shad-
ows.

Thence he selected a necklace of great
price from its purity of ore and rarity of
workmanship ; a gold serpent so flexible that
It curled like a living snake and seemed al-

ii;

SANTA BARBARA.

Ill

most imbued with life as its emerald eyes
sparkled in the dark. He paid for it and put
It loosely m his pocket, refusing the case in
which the jeweller wished to enclose it.
1 hen he went to his gondola waiting at the
water steps between the pillars of the Piaz-
zetta. An hour or two later, as the heat of
the day cooled, he had the gondola moored
to the rmg in the landing stair of the Cam-
piello dei Merli, an abandoned little square,
one of those green places where, in the Ven-
ice of 61d, the citizens used to keep their
sheep ; surrounded now on three sides by
palaces gone to ruin, and having in its centre
the well with two kneeling angels, of which
she had spoken, which was said or supposed
to be the work of Tullio Lombardo.

Poor people alone occupied these once
noble houses; their rags of many colors flut-
terea from the ogive windows, and naked
babies tumbled in numbers on the short turf
His Barbara, his Europa, lived here i To
Dorat, used to luxury and ease, it seemed an
outrage against nature and against art, that
a creature so beautiful should dwell in such
squalor ana in penury, with all the meagre
and dull atmosphere of poverty.

** Can I see Veronica Venier, the wife of the

erald eyes
it and put
ie case in
inclose it.
ng at the
' the Piaz-
le heat of
a moored
the Cam-
!e square,
the Ven-
eep their
sides by-
its centre
of which
supposed

2se once
►lors flut-
id naked
hort turf.
re ! To
emed an
art, that
in such
meagre

fe of the

SJATTJ BARBARA. ^^

sailor Tron ? " he asked the people of the
Campo who had come to gaze at him. Thev

■^^ri^"]' ^"''^'■---. abbreviated into
Nica ! Nica ! awoke the echoes of the old
d.Iap,dated walls. She came in answer out of
an arched stone portico, her head uncovered
shadmg her eyes with her hand from the blaze

e2ected"v ' f V "^^ "'°"^'^' "'^^ ^"^^ had
expected h.m, for her clothes were of a better

kmd than those which she had worn in the
mommg. and in her breast there was a kno
01 red carnations.

said 'rlr-! """l?? '° '^^ '■'^ ^"^^'^ °f 'he well,"
little thmg m memory of to-day "

She was leaning against the marble side
of the well, and the neighbors and children

as Dordt w.th a sudden movement which took
her t ,.erly by surprise clasped the golden
snake about her throat.

;' Ah," she cried, quickly, and with that

made her h "°°' """^^^ ""'' '^' ^^'^ -h^
made her beauty so much greater.

Uorat, turning to the neighbors, said:

She saved my life from a snake this morn-

And snakes brmg good fortune, they say "

SANTA BARBARA.

Good fort

une, indeed," grumbled one old
crone, " if they hang your neck about with
gold ! "

Veronica, raising her arms, tried to unclasp
the gold snake from her throat, but in vain ;
it had closed with a spring and Her fingers
could not find its secret. Dorlt, smiling, st'ood
and watched her unavailing efforts.

"Do not be unkind to me," he murmured,

" it is but a trifle, a toy ; keep it, I entreat

you. It has a grander place there than if it

were ori the throat of any princess. Keep it

,in memory of me."

Veronica stood irresolute ; a beautiful fig-
ure with her raised hands still behind her
throat, and shadows of longing, of irresolu
tion, of pleasure, of fear, of embarrassment,
and of natural pride all passing over her ex-
pressive countenance, while the children hung
on her skirts to stare, and a clove pink fell
from her breast on the stones. Dor^t stooped
and took up the flower. Then, being an un-
erring artist in the arts of life and of love, as
in his art of painting, he gave her no chance
to repent or to refuse, no opportunity to de-
bate or to protest, but bowed low to her as to
any great lady and left the Campiello while
she still stood iriesolute, the golden adder

ed one old
ibout with

to unclasp
It in vain ;
ler fingers
ling, stood

nurmured,

I entreat

than if it

Keep it

lutiful fig.
ehind her
f irresolu
rassment,
r her ex-
Iren hung
pink fell
t stooped
ig an un-
f love, as
o chance
ty to de-
her as to
Ilo while
sn adder

SANTA BARBARA.

. dasped about her throat ; the children and
I the women clamorous around her, and on

^'vTr yf^. '^^ ^"-^^' ^^ ^^^ ^^" kneeling
with folded wings as the sculptor had left them
there three hundred years before.

Veronica stood there as in a dream, listen-
ing to the soft splash of the gondolier's oar as
he descended the narrow side-canal, now
tinted with all colors and glowing with the
cnmson reflections from the western skies.

1 he carnation dropped from DorSt's hold
into thejater as he shifted the cushions to
stretch himself at ease.

Poor women in Italy often possess jewelry
that IS both good and handsome, as heirlooms,
or as marriage portions, but Veronica came of
people too poor for her to own anything more
than the silver earrings which Zuan Tron had
given her on her bridal day. Her father and
brothers were workers in one of the smelting
furnaces ; and Tron was but a common sailor
who brought home little from his voyages •
slie had a room or two which she shared with
Iron s sister, and she made a little money for
herself by washing linen. Her name was the
old ducal name of the Venier; and, maybe,
she had their blood in her; maybe her an-
cestors had worn the pearl-sown robes and

SANTA BARBARA.

^^H

it 111 '

■

lUl''

f f
til

! i
1

( 1
t

^^^^^^^H

■■

;< :,,fl

1; hI .

1 '

\ >

lit

i f

golden bugole of Dogaresse, and gone in
state to hear mass at San Marco ; but, if so
the traditions of such grandeur were all lost
under the accumulation of the centuries, and in
the darkness of ignorance and poverty. She
was only a poor sailor's wife; a woman who
beat hnen with wood in the canal-water and
hung it on a cord to dry.

- Therefore thegoldenadJermade her heart
leap m her bosom with elation and triumph •
and yet-and yet-she was a proud woman J
and an mnocent woman ; it was not well for
her to keep it, she knew that.
^ When she unclasped it from her throat at
night, she laid it on her pillow ; and all the
night she could not rest. .

It was a night of rainless storm ; the heav-
ens were filled with lightning ; and the vivid
flashes came through her unshuttered case-
ment, and lit up the little snake with its em-
erald eyes, as it lay on the rough hempen
pillow where the rude head of Zuan Tron had
so often reposed. With the first flush of
morning she slipped the necklace in her
breast, and went out and finished her wash-
ing, and spread the linen on the stones of the
Campo to dry.

Then when it was noonday she took her

and gone in
3 ; but, if so,
^ere all lost
turies, and in
•verty. She
woman who
al-water and

de her heart
id triumph;
>ud woman ;
not well for

er throat at
and all the

; the heav-
d the vivid
ttered case-
vith its em-
jh hempen
1 Tron had
t flush of
ce in her
her wash-
Dnes of the

2 took her

■'■^

SMJVrj BARBARA. gg

way to the cloister of San Francesco. Do-
rat was again there painting; he saw her en-
trance w.th a smile ; he mistoolc her errand ;
he fel a passmg irritation, a vague distaste
he did not care for a woman who offered her-

" She might have waited," he thought, as
Lttery' '°'"' ^°'^' °' ^^'=°'"« -"^

tl,f"u ^^'"^ "°' ^^^'^ ^'' ^""-d^ ; =l»e took
he gold adder out of her bosom and held it
toward him.

■■ It is beautiful " she said, with a hot color
n her cheelcs, " but it is not for me ; give il
to your aama; I want no payment."

Dordt was so surprised that for an instant
he was sdent, gozing at her in stupor; a
woman forego a jewel !-she could not'be in

Then' 7'';°"' " '" 'he canal if you choose."

him ^hef f' f ""^ ''•'"'"^ °" ^^^' showed
him the full splendor of her fair skin, her

^ZTl'r 'Z '°^"-''^^ "P^. his' tone
melted and changed, and grew passionate and

supphcatmg. .. Keep it, keep it, not in pay-

ment. hut- ip r«tr.o^i r^. , ^ J'

^ -u. .1. .v-m^uiuiarice. Did you not save

my hfe from that little poisonous black bels"

SANTA BARBARA,

P'l

I have no dama ; all women that I have pos-
sessed are as nothing now that I have seen
you. Do you know how great your own
beauty is ? "

Veronica heard him with a vague terror,
but with a strong confused sense of power
and of pleasure. Men had told her often of
her beauty ; but not in this way, or in these
words. .

" I cannot take it," she repeated with em-
barrassment, clinging to that one idea which
had brought her thither, and powerless to ex-
press her feelings, as the uneducated always
are. " I cannot take it. Tron would see it
when he comes home and he would beat me.
I came only to bring it back here, because
you are a stranger and I know not where you
dwell, or where you lodge even here. There
is no need for you to have any gratitude. I
merely took the little beast off your hand.
Cattina would have done the same had she
been near."

Dor^t looked at her in silence; he won-
dered if her rejection of it was sincere ; he
believed but very little in the words of any
woman.

"If you be too proud to take a gift from
me," he said, with affected mortification,

I have pos-
I have seen
t your own

igue terror,
56 of power
her often of
, or in these

id with em-
j idea which
erless to ex-
ated always
ould see it
Id beat me.
re, because
t where you
re. There
latitude. I
y^our hand,
ne had she

SAJ^A BARBARA,

won-

incere ; he

rds of

any

a gift from
)rtification,

" will you be content to earn it ? You can do
so easily."

Her large calm eyes, the eyes of the Sta
Barbara, lightened with pleasure and expec-
tation.

" Earn it .? But I could never earn it ! you
mean. I suppose, by washing your linen ; but
It would take years."

" No ; you can earn it in a week, if you
will. '

" How .? "

Unconsciously to herself, her whole face
spoke the wistfulness and eagerness of her
longmg for this toy; her breath came and
went rapidly ; her whole form seemed tremu-
lous with a childlike yet passionate desire.

" Let me make a portrait of you," said
Dor^t, simply.

" Of me .? But I am nothing ! " she ex-
1". u^^ t!" ^' ^S:norance and her surprise.
Why should you want to make a picture of
me?

Dor^t smiled ; he saw her words were quite
smcere. ^

" Because you are a beautiful woman," he
answered ; " you do not seem to know it or

to care about it, b

t it is So.

If you will come

to me a few hours now and then, you will

SANTA BARBARA.

have more than earned the necklace, since
you wish to earn it ; and your husband, when
he sees it, will have no cause to blame you.
Will you not do this little thing fpr me ? "

" Feihaps," she said, slowly and doubt-
ingly, for the idea was strange to her; she
was of the city of Tintoretto and of Titian,
but of pictures she knew nothing, though she
knelt before them sometimes and said her
prayers.

" You wish me to come here ? " she asked.

" H^re at first if you please," said Dor^t,
and he looked away from her as he spoke,
" but afterward you. must come to my studio.
I cannot finish a portrait in the open air."

" But you are making this picture of the
garden in the open air ? "

" This is different. Tell me, will you let
me paint your portrait } Just as I saw you
first, standing with the sun shining about your
head and the sheaf of lavender lying at your
feet. All the great world shall see it, and
will see in it that the women of Palma Vec-
chio and of the Veronese live still in Venice."
She was silent ; the world conveyed no
sense to her ; she had never been farther

CiMP'V tllf» twpl-/a|-e tfinn *-r\ <-U« lol'^'^Jc? -i.f "^T

_ . — _. ,T i^v^i uj iiiciii \.\j Ln\^ ibifiiiuS Oi iViuriinO

and of Mazzarbo when the fruit was ripe, and,

lace, since
•and, when
)Iame you.
me ? "
nd doubt-

her; she
of Titian,
lough she

said her

;he asked,
.id Dor^t,
lie spoke,
ny studio,
n air.
ire of the

II you let
saw you
bout your
§• at your
;e it, and
Ima Vec-
Venice."
veyed no
m farther
i Murano
ripe, and,

S^JVrA BARBARA. 33

though she was a manner's wife, she did not
understand what other countries and other
nations meant. But she understood that
Dor^t thought her beautiful ; and she would
not have been a woman born of a woman if
she had not felt a thrill of that consciousness
in her innermost being.

" You will come.? " said Dor^t, softly.

'' Yes," she said, slowly, " I will come."

" And you will keep the necklace } "

"Not till I have earned it."

From that resolution he could not move
her ; she would not take the little golden
snake till she had earned it, though her whole
soul sighed for it.

He had perforce to let her go that day, for
she was in haste, being wanted by her sister-
m-law.

"You will come back to-morrow?" he
asked, persuasively.

" ^^\ to-morrow," she said, calmly ; and
then with her ■' Add^, 'cellenza," she went
away from him across the sunlight down the
marble arcade of the cloister.

Dorat watched her with languid eves
amorous and yet cold; he was a man who
^^u.d wait. He put the gold adder in one of
the drawers of his color-box; one day very

SANTA BARBARA.

:i'!l;''!mi;^

!i^

soon it would be round her throat ; what mat-
ter A day sooner or a day later when one is
certain to succeed at last ?

And yet the calm noble simplicity of her in
her strength and beauty sank with a certain
profoundness of impression into his mind,
sated, selfish, and sensual though it was.
" She is a grand creature," he thought, " des-
pite all her ignorance and poverty and her
frankness of desire for that jewelled toy."

He painted very litde that day, but sat and
dreamed in the sweetness of the garden,
dreams of things which his youth had de-
sired, and the visions of which had been hus-
tled and hurried away by the rush of those
passions and follies and ambitions and achieve-
ments which had filled his years since the
world had made him famous.

" Santa Barbara se donne ^ moi," he mur-
mured, recalling the words of his letter to his
friend. ♦' Je ne croyais pas avoir si bien dit ! "
And within a yard or two of him the litde
dead body of the adder lay under the saxi-
frage leaves whither the sacristan had swept
it with his broom the day before ; a sun-dried,
wrinkled, shrivelled litdd thing, looking like
a small burnt branch, a shred of leather. Its
work was done.

what mat-
^hen one is

y of her in
h a certain
his mind,
:h it was.
ght, " des-
y and her
i toy."
>ut sat and
e garden,
h had de-
been hus-
h of those
id achieve-
since the

he mur-
tter to his
bien dit ! "
I the little
the saxi-
lad swept
sun-dried,
)king like
ther. Its

SANTA BARBARA. ^e

The picture of the cloister and the garden
was laid aside, and waited, with its canvas
turned to the wall, in the sacristan's room

The portrait of Veronica grew in its stead,
a portrait taken in the fulness of the day-
hght with that strong sunshine shed over it
m which Dorat excelled ; the marble pave-
ment under her feet, the rosy saxifrage and
the y^Woj tiger lilies behind her, and above
all the blue sky with boughs of oleander in
white blossom crossing it.

"The pose is a little too much like Sta
Barbara s, and the pdte a little too much like
Cabanel s,' thought Dor^t, who was quickly
disenchanted with his own creations " It is
not a Titian nor a Veronese ; it is only a
Bouguereau ! " ^

But it was beautiful, and it was not the
portrait which he wanted to gain, but the
woman ; he was an artist indeed, but he was
beyond all a voluptuary.

Seven mornings she came to the garden in
the warmth of the forenoon, and stood for
him with the sacristan's wife and children
looking on, and the monks, who were sociable
and not hermits, came now and then also down
the middle aisle and talked of wh^t ^ao kejno-
done as became friars who had paintings of

SANTA BARBARA.

:lii!lt

m \

Gian Bellini and the Veronese on the walls
of their church hard by ; the gardener monk
who came thither with his spade, and rake,
and shears, and water-pot, was in especial
eloquent.

" It would make an altarpiece, my son, and
you might give it to us," he said, ''only you
have put such a profane look into it ; it will
not be a holy picture if you do not correct
that ; and myself I wonder why you paint
new things at all ; the chromo-lithographs in
the shops under the Procuratie are so very
fine ; there is a reduction of the * Assumption '
of our Titian there that I would sooner have
myself than the original, for the colors are
brighter and the size more sensible."

" Your government has had the * Assump-
tion ' daubed over until it is hardly better than
a chromo-lithograph, and you are verily wise
as your generation is wise, my father," said
Dordt, angrily, as the rotund figure of the
monk, clothed in brown and with a hoe on
his shoulder, came between him and the sun-
light.

" I cannot paint here," he said, impatiently
to Veronica a little later, "I cannot paint
here with these chattering fobols about us ;
you must come to my studio to-mdrrow."

SANTA BARBARA,

m the walls
lener monk
;, and rake,
in especial

ny son, and

"only you

D it ; it will

not correct

you paint

ographs in

ire so very

ssumption '

Doner have

colors are

* Assump-
better than
verily wise
Lther," said
ure of the

a hoe on
id the sun-

mpatiently
nnot paint
about us ;

row.

" Where is that ? "

" On the Fondamento of the Malcanton."
You know the house where the fig-tree
hangs over the wall."

"But will it be well.? Cattina said but
^ yesterday to me : * See, I am here, and the
children and the holy men come and go, and
so Tron will not mind much when he returns
but beware how you go to his house by your^
self —she meant your house."

" Do not heed Cattina or anyone, and
what of Tron ? He cannot be here yet. He
IS gone to Greece, you say, and those heavy,
laden brigs sail very slowly."

*' But he will come back, sail they ever so
slowly, and "

" You are afraid of him } "

" I do not know." She did not know ; the
poor are too ignorant to sift, to analyze, to
classify, and to docket their emotions and
sensations as cultured minds do theirs.

/'Why did you marry him ? " asked Dorat,
with impatience and scorn.

" I do not know," she said again. His
questions disturbed her, as stones thrown in-
to a well of still water trouble its clear sur-
•ace*

" I will tell you," said Dor^t ; - you were

SANTA BARBARA,

a girl, and girls are curious, and vain, and
inquisitive, and the first man .who comes is
welcome — was it not so ? "

•' Perhaps," she said, with a blush which
came and went. " Zuan is handsome," she
added with pride, " so strong and tall ; you
would want to paint him if you saw him."

" Ah," said Dorat with irritation, '* it was
his good looks and his straight limbs which
tempted you, then."

"Perhaps," she answered again, but she
answered uneasily; she was perplexed and
troubled by this search into her motives and
feelings. Zuan was handsome, but he was
rude and violent; he swore at her in his
wrath as he swore at the ropes and the sails
when the waves were running high and the
brig laboring through a white squall along
the coasts of Dalmatia or Albania.

Dordt looked at her where she stood in the
transparent light ; her head and arms uncov-
ered, her swelling bosom confined by the
white linen bodice she wore, her whole as-
pect that of one of those strong and fertile
women with whom the quays and bridges and
calle of Venice had been full in the days

when Ciiorcrinn«=» an*^ V/at-onf»«"^ ''«-' Tw'--

had found their saints and goddesses in the

SANTA BARBARA,

maidens drying their golden locks seated in
high air on their wooden altane, and sketched
their Madonnas from the young matrons
suckling their big-eyed babies in the noon-
day heat under the vine-bower of a traghetto.

"You must come to me in Malcanton," he
said, abruptly; "I cannot paint here, with
these people about, and in this glare of
light. What should you fear ? No one need
know. If they do, it would not matter. No
one will see your picture here. It will go with
me to Paris."

"What is Paris?"

"The heaven of women and the smelting-
house of genius. You do not understand?
Of course you do not. That is what is so
divine in you. You might be Eve or Lilith
living in a virgin world."

He spoke dreamily, to himself rather than
to her ; and drew out the drawer of his color-
box in which the gold adder lay, and turned
it over with his hand carelessly, as if seeking
the colors which lay beside it.

Veronica's eyes fell on it ; and her heart
heaved under the linen of her gown.

"Come to my house," said Dor^t, softly,
"come to-morrow to Malcanton."

She hesitated a moment and glanced to-

"^,1

SANTA BARBARA.

ward the sacristan's wife, who was washing
carrots and peeling onions between two of
the marble columns.

" I will come," she said, in a low voice ; *' but
do not let Cattina know."

"Cattina shall not know, any more than
tl:e adder that lies dead in the saxifrage."

Then he added a few touches, a little
color, to the portrait he had made of her, so
that the monk and the won .an might see him
at work; and somewhat later let her go away
from the garden by the narrow passages
which turn and twist behind the church, pas-
sages full of teeming families, curly-haired
children, fluttering rags, scarlet runners cling-
ing to strings, little vines which flourish
seemingly without soil, and here and there in
the dirt and confusion and squalor, a brass
vessel of beautiful shape, a marble lintel of
beautiful moulding, an iron scroll-work balco-
ny fit for Desdemona, or an ogive window
with some broken fresco-color on it, under
which Stradella may have played a serenade
in the moonlight.

Dordt put the necklace once more in his
pocket and went to his gondola.

"A daughter of the gods, a sister of the
samts/' he thought, "and yet won by a little

SANTA BARBARA,

gold beaten out and curled ab" ^1; by a jewel-
ler's cunning! They are all like that, all ; the
cabotine sleeps in every madonna of them
all."

Veronica, meanwhile, who knew the multi-
tudinous mazes of her city by heart, went on
fast through the narrow ways and over the
small bridges straight across the city, until
behind the Grimani Palace she reached the
church of Sta Maria Formoso.

There she entered and crossed herself, and
knelt for a few moments, then rose, and
asked one of the vergers where the famous
picture was. Being told, she went to the
first side altar on the right of the entrance,
and gazed at the Santa Barbara until her eyes
were green blind.

* Like me ! Like me ! " she thought. She
knew nothing of pictures, less even than the
monk who preferred the chromo-lithographs
of the shops, but she could see that this saint
was beautiful, and he had said that she, a
poor common woman, a sailor's wife, resem-
bled her !

She sank down on her knees before the al-
tar and tried to pray again, but could not ;
her heart beat too tumultuously, her brain
was in too great a confusion of pride and of

m'm

\4lf

it;"'

SAATTA BA/iBA/?A.

pleasure. She was like this great and heav
enly creature ! iilce this famous picture which
strangers came from far and wide to see i

•■Had It been painted from the saint her-
self? she aslced of an old beggar, who was
near when she rose from her knees.

The old man chuckled a little, decorously,
as beseemed a reverend place. "Not if
they do say it was painted from Violante, the
parnter s daughter, who was a iove of Ti-
t.ans. Titian was in luck; she must have
been a rare one, and fine and strong, coo "

Veronica went out of the churcix with a
dizzy sweetness dazing her mind and soul, and
took her way homeward by the lovely bridge
of Paradise and under the vista supcfia of

Tax a Z"'-: ^^'" '^' ''^'^^'i the Cam.
p.eIlo del Mem It was late; her sister-in-law
was scolding vigorously, the children werecrv
ing. the neighbors were quarrelling, the fish
was burning m the frying-pan, the washed linen
was lying in a heap on the kitchen floor, un-
ironed and unstarched. It all struck on her
painfully with a sudden perception wholly new
to her, of Its penury, its noise, its coarseness,
Its squalor, its misery.

that which IS forever about us we are both

SANTA BARBARA.

blind and deaf until some ray of light from
another world than ours is shed upon our
darkness.

The calm green garden, the cool white
cloisters, the sweet penetrating voice of DorAt,
the homage and the eloquence of his eyes, all
seemed lo her very far away, far as a dream
of the night.

"Have you sold the gold snake and
brought us the money } " asked her sister-in-
law.

" I gave it back to the gentleman a week
ago, said Veronica, in a low, unsteady tone

" More fool you," said the other woman.

The following day she did not go to the
palace in Malcanton.

On ^ the day after that, while it was still
early in the forenoon, she was beating her
hnen in the canal water, leaning down from an
old black boat of Zuan's under the slender-
shade of an acacia-tree, when the strokes of a
gondolier's oars came near to her and she saw
Dorat. The gondola paused by her.

" Why are you unkind to me } " he mur-
mured, with his hand on the side of her boat
She grew very red, and with her wet fingers
^.urriedly drew together the cotton folds of her
bodice which had opened as she leaned over

SANTA BARBARA,

the side to dip her hnen in the water ; she
felt that her hair was loose, her face and body
were heated.

" Why are you so unkind to me?" he re-
peated. " Without you I can do nothing with
this portrait which might be so beautiful."

•' There are many other women, and I am
busy, as you see."

"Leave those rags and come with me.
There is no other woman in Venice who has
the face of Santa Barbara and the form of
Europa. Come."

"With you.? Like this.? Oh, no, oh,
no ! " ,

She spoke in infinite distress, her hands un-
consciously wringing out the folds of one of
Tron's rough blue shirts.

" Well, come by yourself if you will, but
soon— I mean while the morning light holds.
Mia cara, what use is it to have saved my life
from the little snake, if you poison it to me.
yourself.?"

"You laugh at me when you say such
follies," said Veronica, with a flush on her
face, half of anger, half of humiliation, yet with
a pleasure in her soul which was stronger than
either.

"No," said Dordt, softly, "I speak in all

SANTA BARBARA.

vater; she
J and body

?" he re-
thing with
itiful."
and I am

with me.
; who has
s form of

, no, oh,

hands un-
)f one of

will, but
bt holds,
d my life
it to me.

jay such
i on her
yet with
g^er than

ik in all

seriousness. Your beauty haunts me. If you
will not let me capture it at least in semblance
on canvas, my days will be useless and your
memory joyless to me. You know nothing of
the world, but there are great cities in it
where I can make men worship your effigy.
You know nothing of books, but I think die
public reader in Venice still reads aloud Ari-
osto to the people sometimes, does he not .?
Ariosto, one saint's day, met a woman wear-
ing a robe embroidered with golden branches
of palm ; and that palm-bearer changed the
ways of his life for him ; so you have changed
mine."

The dulcet and poetic flattery, which was
none the less sweet to her thnt she only most
imperfecdy comprehended it, sank into the
very soul of Veronica as she listened, shrink-
mg back from his gaze under the boughs of
the mimosa acacia. At that moment the shrill
voice of Tron's sister called to her from the
Campiello.

^ " Do not let her see you," said Veronica,
in terror. " Go, go, pray go ; she is a cruel
woman, and Zuan bade her watch me."

"Come, then, where she cannot watch

von I "

J — -

"I will come," murmured Veronica, as she

SANTA BARBARA,

ii!'

heard the heavy step of her sister - in - law
sounding nearer and nearer over the stones.

" Have you not done yet, 'Nica ? " cried the
woman; "a fine wife you make for a poor
sailor. If Zuan hearken to me, he will bring
you nought home but a rope's end. A few
shirts to dip, and you are all the morning at
it ! Did my brother marry you to keep you
like a duchess ? "

" Come to me, and you shall have in recom-
pense what you will," said Dorat. Then he
made a sign to his gondolier; and the man
backed with a single sweep of his oar be-
tween » some great black barges moored there,
which screened him from the sight of the sis-
ter of Zuan Tron as she came down, breath-
less, blousy, dishevelled, and bursting with
invectives, to the edge of the stones where
the acacia grew.

But Veronica did not go that day, nor the
next to that. Her resistance increased his
desire and his resolution a hundredfold. He
followed her, he interrupted her, he besieged
her ; what was it he asked ? So little ! Only
a few hours of morning light that he might
make her beauty as famous to the world as it
was dear to him. Whenever she went to
pray in the churches near, which she did

SANTA BARBARA.

often, for Venetians are pious and humble
children of the Church, he was there in the
mellow incense-scented shadows, and his
presence filled her whole existence ; she
could not sleep, or work, or eat for that one
thought : she was a creature of simple mind,
of clear conscience, of perfect honesty, but in
her nature there was a capacity for strong
passion, for romantic illusion, and to these he
appealed irresistibly.

Zuan Tron's wooing had been brutality,
not love ; had she known it, Dor^t's desires
were no less brutal, and were no more love.
But they were veiled in the soft, dreamy
colors of art, of apparent deference, of sweet
persuasive solicitation, and they seemed to
her as the warm and soft south wind seemed
after the bitter blasts of the north from the
mountains. The contest was unequal, as
unequal as the contest of the lutist and the
nightingale in Ford's great poem. The lut-
ist had all the resources and endurance of
art and of artifice ; the nightingale had only
Its own little beating heart and throbbing-
throat. ^

The days passed and she did not yield ;
and the cloister garden saw neither her nor
Dor^t.

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SANTA BARBARA.

((

That great gentleman is always after

you; if you brought home

leas

money,

might be worth while," said the sister of
Tron ; " if you brought home money may be
I would say nothing to Zuan when he comes
back."

"You are a vile woman," said Veronica,
with all her face in a glow of shame and
rage ; ignorant of how much the gold coins
of Dor^t had already to do with the relaxing
of her sister-in-law's vigilance. But she was
restless, feverish, ill at ease ; she had strange
dreams when she did sleep ; and it was in
vain that she besought the guidance of Sta
Barbara.

Sta Barbara had been a princess and a
warrior, her chastity decked in armor, and
the splendors of wealth around her, with her
cannon and her tower, emblems of her
strength. What could she know of the temp-
tations assailing a poor sailor's wife ?

" You are cruel to me," said Dorat, and re-
peated it so often that the ignorance of her
mind and the tenderness of her nature blended
together in a sense of tormenting reproach ;
she believed that he suffered ; his pallor, his
restlessness, his heavy eyes, his feverish
movements seemed to her like the suffering

.'i*-

SANTA BARBARA.

vays after

at least it

i sister of

ey may be

he comes

Veronica,
hame and
g-old coins
e relaxing
t she was
id strange

it was in
tice of Sta

:ss and a
mor, and
, with her
5 of her
the temp"

•

it, and re-
ice of her
e blended
■eproach ;
)allor, his
feverish
suffering

of the soul, and all that he told her she be-
lieved. Indeed for the moment he was sin-
cere ; m their desires men lie like truth be-
cause they do not know that they are lying- •
what they wish for is to them, as to children
the universe for that one moment, and they
are honest when they vow it is so.

" Will ycu come once more at least to the
cloister 1 if you will not to my house," he
asked,, -what can you fear.? Zuan Tron
himself might see you in the garden, what
could he say.? We are hardly ever alone.
It IS a sacre ace."

" I will c: ;;- once more, then, there," said
Veronica, reluctantly; and yet with all her
whole bemgm a tumult of longing fear and

2: 2 '°u "?' ^^ ^"y ^'■°"ff °' perilous,
she thought; the children ran in and out

Cattrna was the sacristan's wife, always near,
usually some monk paced through the aisles.
There could be no risk of harm in going
there, she thought. ^

It was a brilliant morning when she reached
ban Francesco on the morrow. Rain had
fallen m the night and washed all things fresh
and fe.r. The herbs in the garden filed the
a.r w.th pungent sweetness. Some lizards
swayed themselves on the blossoms of the

SANTA BARBARA.

liiii'f;

1 1:

rose laurels. Some pigeons scratched among
the thyme and basil.

" I thank you for this at least," said Dordt,
grave 7 and with deference ; the portrait of
her, in its shadowy, unfinished suggestion,
stood on an immense easel within one of the
arcades. He placed her in the attitude of
the Sta Barbara, and himself almost turning
his back on her, and only looking at her fur-
tively from time to time, painted on steadily
without heeding the woman Cattina who came
and looked on till she was tired, or the gar-
dener monk who was digging in one of the
borders, or the sacristan who said that the
picture would be a better one if Veronica bor-
rowed his wife's best feast-day gown, a fine
blue gown with red and yellow ribands at-
tached to it.

Dor^t answered them no single word, and
they talked till they were tired, and went away
unnoticed and displeased. It was noon when
he had worked two hours ; the drowsy heat
lay like a weight upon the eyelids ; the green
leaves lost their verdure and drooped ; the
monks went into the monastery, the shutters
were shut in the sacristan's windows, and
the church itself was closed ;' entire silence
reigned everywhere.

:hed among

said Dorat,
portrait of
suggestion,
I one of the
attitude of
ost turning
at her fur-
on steadily
a who came
or the gar-
one of the
id that the
ironica bor-
own, a fine
ribands at-

: word, and
went away
noon when
rowsy heat
; the green
)oped ; the
le shutters
dows, and

cire

sih

SANTA BARBARA, rj

Dor^t turned and laid down his palette and
brushes and looked at her ; she colored over
all her face and throat under that gaze which
seemed like a very flame of fire stealing into
all the recesses of her soul. She had stood
still like a thing carved in marble for two
whole hours ; a sense of oppression, of faint-
ness, ol dizziness came over her, strong though
she was in her sea-fed vigor and youth.

her till he was so close that his lips brushed
her hair and with a touch soft and swift as
the touch of the living adder had been, his
hands stole round her throat, and clasped the
golden adder around it. Then, unresisting,
she sank into his arms.

"Santa Barbara s'est donn^e i moi "
thought Dorat a month later, "et que puis-je
en faire, mon Dieu ? " •*

The warmth of the summer passed; the

dHfte/'T '"u "''^"'^^^ the white fogs
f:t' ■':/''7 *« Adriatic and shrouded the
..ulp^ures of the Salute, and the golden
domes of St. Mark's as in a vapor of !now"

fii

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liil'iil'

;.:ni

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i I

w
m

SANTA BARBARA.

the noons were still hot and the waters still
were beautiful, with fruit boats and barges
. piled high with grapes coming in from all the
isles, and filling the city with their regal pur-
ple and gold. And in the studio on the canal
of the Malcanton a great picture was finished
in which his fullest genius and mastery of color
had found exprassion ; the portrait of 1 wom-
an with the head of Sta Barbara and the body
of Europa. Painted with singular rapidity
and strength, it had the vitality of a sudden
passion in it ; it lived, it breathed, it spoke ;
it was the incarnation of Woman.

But^ he had given a high price for it. He
had created a passion in another over which
he had no control, one of those mtense un-
reasoning absolute passions which can onlj
exist in natures which are all sense and emo-
tion, and over which the mind has no domi-
nance, and in which all reason is dumb.

He had destroyed in her the calm of igno
ranee, and the simplicity of unconscious chas-
tity ; and there had arisen in their stead one
of those violent, delirious, exhausting tem-
pests of love, which is ecstasy to a lover for a
little time, and then appalls, enthralls, wearies,
and burdens him, and clings to him., fatal as
the shirt of Nessus.

SANTA BARBARA.

waters still
and barges
Vom all the
r regal pur-
•n the canal
^as finished
ery of color
: of 1 wom-
id the body
ar rapidity
f a sudden
, it spoke;

for it. He
iver which
n tense un-
i can onl)
and emo-
» no domi-
umb.

m of igno
lious chas-
stead one
Jting tern-
lover for a
3, wearies,
n, fatal as

She was a beautiful woman, yes ; but when
her beauty had been made wholly his, and
studied, devoured, and known in every line
both by his art and by his senses, her -mind
could say nothing to his, and he asked him-
self witii a sigh what should he do with this
adoration which he had called into being ?

He had no love for her ; and the violence
the immensity, the absorption of the love she
felt for him terrified him. He had desired a
summer week's caprice, a conquest for his
art and for his senses, and she dreamed of
an eternity of union. All the ardors dormant
in her had awakened into life, and clung to
him with a force which was commensurate
with the physical strength and the splendid
vitality in Iier. Sometimes he felt as if the
adder she had killed had taken resurrection
in her, and clasped him and curled round him
and drew away his very life until he swooned.
He had forgotten the sheer animalism of
the untutored human creature, and the in-
tense avarice and jealousy and greed of love
in a woman whose intelligence is a blank.
And he was himself unreasonable. He had
had no rest until he had banished her modes-
ty, her serenity, her peaceful ignorance of
passion, and yet he was dissatisfied now be-

SANTA BARBARA,

II :;ii!i ,

cause she was no longer the same woman
who had looked at him with those tranquil
eyes of Palma Vecchio's saint.

The chill of the autumn was on the air, the
mists of the autumn made the sails limp and
wet, the lagoons drear and rough, the golden
altars of the churches dim and dull ; and Ven-
ice held him no more in her sovereign charm ;
he grew restless for mcement and change
and the cities and companionship of men.
" All of her that I care to keep is here," he
thought as he looked at the picture, " and
what can I do with the living woman ? "

And he felt unkind, unn^rateful, almost base ;
yet the poet is right :

How is it under our control
To love or not to love ?

!ii:

If he took her away with him, he knew well
what the issue would be : the old, old story ;
the terrible idolatry on one side gnawing ever
stronger oix neglect and coldness, the indiffer-
ence on the other which would become, under
exaction and reproach, impatience, intoler-
ance, and even at the last hatred, the cruellest
hatred of all : that which spurns what it once
fondly sought.

tiiiii^

SANTA BARBARA.

; and Ven-
ign charm ;
md change
ip of men.
3 here," he
ture, " and
an?"
most base ;

knew well
old story ;
awing ever
he indififer-
ome, under
:e, intoler-
le cruellest
bat it once

He knew it so well, and he was sorry ; for
in so far as he could feel it, being of the tem-
perament he was, he had a compassion which
was almost affection for this woman who had
saved his life while he slept in the cloister
garden, and who had seemed to him on his
awakening half a goddess, half a saint, and
whom he knew now to be but a poor daugh-
ter and wife of rude men, a poor child of ig-
norance and toil, with whom his mind and his
thoughts had no affinity, however closely
their hearts might beat together. And how
to tell her this .? he who had made himself her
earth and heaven.? whose own paradise in-
deed she had even been for a few short sum-
mer weeks in the sweet languor of the Vene-
tian air ?

She had saved his flesh from the sting of
the adder, and he had placed in hers the dy-
ing sting of a deathless desire.

It was harsh, ungenerous, ungrateful, but
he knew that he must leave her, that he would '
leave her, as soon as the first north winds of
November should blow the sea-spray over
the stairs of the Ducal Palace and wash the
rosy feet of the pattering pigeons in its
courts.

The thought of Zuan Tron was unpleasant

SANTA BARBARA,

fel

to him, but not intolerable as it would have
been earlier in the year.

He did not feel for her that love which
creates jealousy, either of the past or of the
future.

What he most feared of ail was that she
should quarrel with her husband, and lean
wholly on himself. But how could he say
that to her when she came to him up the mar-
ble water steps of his house in the moonlight
with such surety and ecstasy of love in her
eyes ? ,

" My poor Veronica, it would have been
well for you if you had let the adder do its
work on me that day," he murmured once to
her. But she would not understand. She
smiled and sighed, that sigh which means that
joy is beyond words. How could she tell
that this adoration, this ardor, these embraces
were not love— were merely the play of a
grown child to whom no plaything could long
suffice? Zuan Tron might kill her when' he
came home ; that she knew ; and sometimes
the terror of his vengeance ran like ice
through the leaping warmth of her veins.
But she put that thought from her. She was
not twenty years old and she was happy.
To other eyes she was only Veronica Venier,

SANTA BARBARA,

the wife of Tron ; but to herself, because to
her lover, she was a goddess, a queeii of
heaven, even as the Barbara was in her im-
mortality, even as the Europa was with her
white breasts and shining hair. She had
drunk deep of the philtre of vanity and pas-
sion ; and when she trod the stones of court
and calle she walked as one whose winged
feet tread on air. Was she not more than
mortal } Had he not found her fair }

" Thou ,rt a fool, thou art a fool ! But I
have m .de solid money out of thee, and
though the gallant will go with the summer,
these^pieces will stay behind him," thought
her sister-in-law, counting over tlje bright
gold and the crisp notes which she had had
from Dorat, and which she had laid up with
her feast-day clothes with sprigs of Easter-
blessed olive to keep thieves away. Zuan
would be none the wiser when he came home
that thieves had been at his treasure ; sailors
went and came and were long away, and
must take their chance of what was done in
their absence.

"He will be back at Ognissanti," said
Veronica once, and her eyes had a look of
c^ppv^ai aii-a leiiur in Liiem as tney gazed mto
Dorat's. He looked away from them.

I;.:'.:

m^'

SANTA BARBARA.

" Ognissanti is not here yet," he answered,
" and ships do not always reach the port for
which they are bound."

" She is a good brig, and they know every
knot of her course as I know the turns of the
calle," she said with a shudder which passed
over the fine smooth skin Hke a cold breeze
that blows over the sun-warmed waters.

" We will show him your portrait when he
comes," said Dor^t, and smiled. The Othel-
los of life had no terrors for him ; this one
would np doubt take gold as his sister had
taken it.

" He is only a working sailor, is he? " he
added. " Well, we will buy him a brig of his
own ; then he will be owner and skipper in
one, and he will be always away on the seas,
and you will be at peace."

" No," said Veronica, abruptly, " you shall
not do that."

The coarseness of the cultured mind stung
and wounded the instinctive honor of the un-
taught nature. Then with passionate tender-
ness and entreaty she threw her white arms,
the arms of Europa, about his throat.

" Take me away before he comes," she
murmured, " take me to your own country,
your own city, anywhere, before he comes."

'<m .

SANTA BARBARA.

" Are you so afraid of the brute ? " he
asked, evading her prayer. Veronica was
silent, her face hidden on *his breast. Then
she said, slowly : " I am afraid, yes ; for as
the Madonna lives in heaven, so surely, if he
try to touch me now, will I -i:rike him dead,
stone dead."

Dorat started and lockvi down on her,
troubled as he was always ; doubled by the
violence and intensity of her feeling for him.
Then he smiled and caressed her.

" O my angel ! he is not worth that, nor
am I. We are in the city of Desdemona and
of Stradella indeed, but those great passions
are not of our day nor of my world. Leave
me to deal with your husband. He shall not
trouble us."

He felt a coward and treacherous as he
spoke. He knew that this was not the recom-
pense she merited, not the devotion that he
had promised ; he was conscious that in con-
trast with the greatness and veracity of her
love for him, this egotism must seem feeble,
ungenerous, pitiful, coarse. But he could not
force himself to say otherwise. He dreaded
with the intensity of long selfishness the bur-
den of her passion, the tumult of jealousy, of
reproach, of violence which would come with

SANTA BARBARA.

fi uiMUh lit

the arrival of her husband if the truth were
made manifest.

He had no physical fear, for he was a brave
man physically, but he dreaded unspeakably
the ridicule of the world, the harassing emo-
tions of untutored and uncontrolled tempera-
ments, and he intended to go away where
these could not trouble or pursue him. She
would be wretched for awhile ; women were
always so : but with a season that would
pass away, and she would learn wisdom and
resignation to the inevitable ; and he would
come to her again sometime in spring or
summer ; he had a certain affection for her,
and she had been his Sta Barbara, his Eu-
ropa. She would always merit some remem-
brance.

Veronica said nothing more that day, but
on the sensuous beauty of her mouth and in
the lustre of her eyes there came a look which
left him uneasy ; the look that he would have
given on canvas to a Clytemnestra or a
Medea.

** O furious Moor ! have you left your som-
bre spirit b eathing on these waters?" he
thought as he passed Othello's house in
fi^oine* to liie Zattere. It was a spirit not
in unison with his own. Like all men who

SANTA BARBARA.

love pleasure he shunned and dreaded pas-
sion.

It was now late in October.
The days were short but luminous still
when the mists did not drift in from the la-
goons of the Lido, or from the marshes oi
the ^ low-lying lands beyond Mestre and
Fucina. Boats still came in with rosy sun-
rise reflection shed on their orange sails, .,nd
took their loads of autumn apples and pears
and walnuts to the fruit market above Rialto.
But soon, very soon, it would be winter, and
the gondolas would glide by with closed
felze, and the water would be a troubled
waste between the city and the Lido, and
men would hurry with muffled heads over the
square of Saint Mark when the Alpine wind
blew, and the strange big ships would creep
on their piloted course tediously and timidly
through the snowstorms to their anchorage
in the wide Giudecca.

And Dor^t would be away. How to tell
her that he was going ? How to plant that
knife in her generous breast ? How to ban-
ish from those adoring eyes that sleep which
he had ceased to care to watch } He was
not heartless, and the knowledge of how
cruelly he would hurt her hurt himself; nor

SANTA BARBARA,

WM-

could he wholly forget that in the clois-
ter garden, this woman, whom he knew he
would desert, had saved his life.

The days passed, each a little shorter, a
little colder than its predecessor; and the
sea-gulls and curlews, finding food rare on
the northern waters, came in thousands near-
er the city.

One morning Veronica went from his pal-
ace in the Malcanton to go as was her wont
to mass, for it was a holy day and the bells
were chiming from the spires and domes, and
the colored banners were hanging above the
church doors, and the sound of sonorous
symphonies and chanting choristers echoed
over the canals.

Dordt lay still on his bed and gazed at her
portrait. It was a great picture ; a picture
which would make all men envy him. Where
it stood in the distance in the studio on to
which his chamber opened, the brilliancy of
the morning light illumined it ; it looked as
she had looked when he had seen her first in
the cloister garden. Barely ten weeks had
gone by since then, but she no longer looked
to him like that. Yet she had true beauty in
her face and form, and sbf* loved hirn — o-r^at
heavens ! how she loved him !

SANTA BARBARA.

he clois-
knew he

horter, a
and the
rare on

ids near-

his pal-
her wont
the bells
mes, and
30ve the
sonorous

echoed

d at her
L picture
Where
o on to
iancy of
oked as
r first in
eks had
r looked
eauty in

" Voil^ le mal," he thought sadly, with the
cruel wisdom of one who has been too often
and too much loved, the sorrowful satiety of
experience.

^ All was silent around him. There is but
little traffic that passes by Malcanton. The
tolling of all the distant bells had not ceased;
high mass was being said in all the churches.'
He stretched his limbs out as he had done
on the marble ledge of the cloister colonnade ;
he slept again, profoundly.

An hour had gone by when he was awak-
ened by the voice of Veronica. In terrible
agitation she cried aloud to him as she hung
over his pillow.

"Wake, oh wake! His brig has been
sighted off the Tre Porte, a sailor has told
me so this morning. By evening he will be
here in the city; do you understand 1 They
have seen his brig coming in by the Tre
Porte ! "

Dor^t, astonished, and scarcely awake,
gazed at her where she knelt beside his couch,
flung down beside it in a vehemence of emo-
tion which shook her from head to foot.

"Do you mean your husband's ship?" he
crixv-^ nex, oLiii druwsy ana bewildered.

" Whose else } Take me away, take me

l'( ■' I4J1

SANTA BARBARA.

MWrn

away ! He shall not touch me, he shall not

look on me ! Do you hear me ? He will be

in port by evening ! "
" Yes, I hear you."
Dorat raised himself on one arm and looked

upon her with pain and trouble. He under-
stood her; but how could he bring her to
comprehend him }

" Why do you have such fear of this man ?
It is needless," he said, persuasively. He need
never know, he will never know, if you have
common prudence ; and I will be always his
best friend and yours, my dear child. Tron
may be a brute, but brutes are tamable ; the
human brute is always tame when he smells
gold, and you know that I am rich. I will
spare nothing to make your life easier and
happier. All things can be managed by
money."

He paused, startled by the expression in
her eyes. Her hands were clenched on the
satin coverlet of the bed.

" You must take me away," she muttered.
"You must take me away, far away, veiy far
before the brig comes in at Ave Maria."

"I cannot do that."

" Cannot — why ? "

He was silent, embarrassed, and not know-

shall not
[e will be

id looked
[e under-
go her to

lis man ?
He need
^ou have
ways his
i. Tron
ble; the
e smells
I will
sier and
ged by

ssion in
on the

uttered,
veiy far

SANTA BARBARA.

>»

t know-

ing how to reason with the unreason of pas-
sion. '^

•■Why cannot you? You love me," she
sa.d, with a vibration of ferocity and suspicion
in her tone. ^

" I love you, certainly," he answered, with
a parsing sigh for the falsehood which would
have been in some senf ■,, a truth only a few
weelcs earher. •• But I cannot take you , here

u°\^ . "^""'"^ ^^ wretched, and I too. I
should have told you this before, but I thought
you understood that-that-in a word, it is
■mpossible. I will come and see you here
every summer. We will be as happy as we
have b But you must be reasonable!

dear Tron will never know. You musi
meet him as you have met him before Do
you not understand.^ It will be painful to
you, bu women can always act if they choose
.We will show him this picture and you wil
tel him you have sat for it, and then\e w
not wonder that we are friends, and I will buy
him the best vessel that is building in the
yards. Veronica, do not look like that- we
will be together every year as we have Cn

and;,1?llAtP^"''^"^ i.^'^^or tragedy.
. ^ .....xv,o uidt are paintui. '

She rose slowly from her knees, and stood

SANTA BARBARA.

m'\

erect beside the bed and gazed down on him ;
it seemed to him a.s if her eyes blazed ftre,
and the fire entered into his very soul and
searched out and searched up all its littleness
and poverty.

'* You would have me live with him, while
I love you ? " she said, slowly, while her white
teeth closed on the red fulness of her louver
lip.

A faint flush of shame passed over his
face : the tone of the words cut him like a
scourge.

" I shall not be here," he murmured, " and
you must be prudent till we meet again ; you
are a noble creature, and very dear to me, but
you do not understand."

" I understand."

An immense scorn flashed over all the
beauty of her face, and quivered in her trem-
ulous nostrils, her breathless mouth, her ag-
onized eyes. Without a word she left him.
At last she understood but too well ; all the
coldness, and tyranny, and cruelty which lie
in mere desire were laid bare to her. Her
hands clutched the golden adder whi h was
always, sleeping and waking, round her L 'oat,
but she could r )t unclasp it.

" He never ioved me, he never I; ed me ! "

SANTA BARBARA.

1 i?','-'

she muttered, as she went through the lofty
reoms, down the staircase, and out onto the
riiarble water-steps.

The'full light of day smote her on her eyes
as with a blow. He had never loved her, but
she had been his ; no other should touch what
he had embraced. There was no escape for
aer possible but in death; by death alone
could she keep inviolate what had been criven
to him. **

Her husband would be in the city at night-
lall. She would have killed him if her lover
had cared, but he did not care, and her own
Jife was hateful to her.

The palace in Malcanton was quite silent
and empty ; there was not even a bird in the
leafless branches of the fig-tree to behold her

" He never loved me ! "- she said once more

between her shut teeth ; <■ but I am his_I am

as dross in his eyes to be passed on to an-

other-but I am his ; Zuan shall never touch
me.

So, knowing well what she did, she de-
scended to the lowest of the water-steps, and
thence stepped calmly from the lowest stair
into the cold, yellow, sluggish water itself, and

threw herself fnrward fa— -J a

---wctiu, iav.v; uuvviiward, upon

Its shmy breast.

SANTA BARBARA.

It was but a few feet deep, but deep enough
to drown.

The mud soon choked her ; the thick glid-
ing current soon stole over her and sucked
beneath it her shining hair, her white bosom,
her beautiful limbs.

And when the brig came into port that
evening, she was lying dead on Dorat's bed,
with the green weeds of the canal caught in
her clenched hands, and the little golden ad-
der clasped about her throat

mough

k glid-
sucked
bosom,

Tt that
t's bed,
ught in
len ad-

POUSSETTE.

^.i^

PoussETTE was a little lady. She was
seven years old. She had various rices
blended in her, but the result of the union,
if incorrect, was charming. She was small,'
and very gay and agile. She was covered
completely with fine silky waving hair of the
palesl buff color; and she had big hazel
eyes . t in her little face with sunbeams
always r' acing in them. Poussette was a
dog, an i not ven a thoroughbred dog; but
she was arisL^ ratic in her appearance and
her tastes, and was as pretty a creature as
ever carried a heart of gold on four little
canine legs ; flying hither and thither in ani-
mated rapture, with the happy conviction that
the world is full of joys and kindness with
which all dogs are born, and which they cher-
ish until the hand of man has beaten it out of
them.

Poussette had never been beaten or even
menaced, so that the world vas really to her

fc*>/'

• ■' IS'

.Pj

POUSSETTE,

a vfery delightful and merry play-place. From
her earliest recollection she had belonged to
the sAme humpi being; and this person,
whatever he might be to others, was good to
her, even though he had called her by such a
naughty slang name as Poussette. His heart
was tenJer for Poussette, though it was hard
to everything else, as the heart of the gam-
bler becomes through the withering dryness of
an ignoble passion which is like a desert wind.
When he was in his darkest moods and
bitterest hours his temper was sullen, and
all his acquaintances feared him, for at such
times he was quarrelsome, and he was known
to be an expert shot and fencer. But Pous-
sette never heard a rough word from him.
Underneath all the harshness and foulness
which had overgrown his original nature,
there remained in him some tenderness and
some pity, and such as these were they were
given to Poussette. ^^ Plus je connais
l'homme,plusj'amie le chien;' has been said
and felt by many worthier and greater per-
sons than he.

The master of Poussette, like many an-
other man, had been meant by nature for
better things than those to which he had
chosen to descend. He was of old family.

POUSSETTE.

was good-looking, talented, and gifted with
that power of charming others which is as
precious as a magic wand ; he had been once
of fair fortune and high ambition, and the
accursed fascination of play had killed the
ambition, scattered the fortune, ahd undone
all the good deeds of nature. He was now
at thirty-eight years of age, a gambler, and
nothmg else. He had lost his estates, his
position, his opportunities, his reputation, and
his own self-respect : and the friends of his
youth, when they saw him on the boulevards
of Paris, or even of Nice, crossed over to the
other side.

. "We are gens tares, Poussette," he said to
his companion ; and Poussette cocked her
pretty ears as joyfully as if to be tard were to
be robed and crowned.

He told himself that he did not care when
those who had been his contemporaries at
the College of Louis le Grand no longer
liked to be seen even to speak to him in the
streets, but in his inmost soul the slight hurt
him ; for he knew that it was his own fault
that he was not as they were : deputies, di-
plomatists, landowners, colonels of cavalry,

heads of p-reat famJliVc rr.o« ^c u„ i I

o — — ^-^'i '^^'■^i.i Oi iiOiJur ana oi

worth, men of use in their generation. When

POUSSETTE,

a boy of sixteen he had fought the Prussians
with fury and admirable courage as a franc-
tireur in his own forest of Vallarec ; the
forests were his no more. He sometimes
wished that a Prussian bullet had killed him
then, under the shadow of his own great
oaks, in his stainless and valiant boyhood.
For he had wit and dignity enough left in
him still to make him despise that which he
had become, and to make him most esteem
those who most despised him also.

Poussette (Jisliked the pavement of Paris
or of any city; she had been born on the
Corniche in one of the fishermen's cabins,
and knew her way all about the coast, and
everyone knew her, from the croupiers of
Monte Carlo to the boat-builders of St. Jean.
For several years of late she and her master
had rarely left the vicinity of the Casino.
More than half his life was spent at the ta-
bles, and Poussette waited patiently for him
under the palms in the gardens. Children with
cakes, women by their caresses, vainly en-
deavored to beguile and attract her. Pous-
sette was never to be seduced from her post.
Often she was hungry, thirsty, sleepy, tired,
but she never stirred until she saw her friend
come down the marble stairs.

POUSSETTE.

Sometimes when fits of shame and black
despair were on him, and he had scarcely a
franc in his pocket, he tore himself wholly
away from the place, and went and lived for
awhile in some fishing village, miserably and
morosely ; but to Poussette these weeks were
ecstasy ; her friend was all her own in them,
and she trotted through the rock pools, and
scratched in the sand, and basked in the sun
and slept on the rough pallet of a hut as hap-
piiy as she had done under the satin and
gilding of the beds at the costly hotels.
Sometimes these periods of retreat would
last weeks, months, sometimes a whole sea-
son, but whether they were short or long,
whenever any money came to him from the
remnants of land v/hich he still possessed, or
from some clever article which he had sent to
the Parisian press, Vallarec at once returned
to the gaming-tables. Sometimes he strove
against his passion, hating both it and him-
self, but in the end it was always stronger
than he, and the long waiting of Poussette
under the palms of the Casino would begin
again.

Her vigils did not make her unhappy, be-

cause she WP«; P cnnnxr.^-xiirv,.^ — cl •

_ ■"!"»> -•-v-m^^cieu, pauent,
contented little soul ; but when she saw the

..It'" "*

iiai.

I '

POUSSETTE.

features she loved contracted and overcloud-
ed by desperation and humiliation then hef-
loyal heart was vexed, and her mind was
troubled ; she could not tell what ailed him,
but she knew that something did. At other
times when hazard favored him, which was
rarely, he abandoned himself to those pleas-
ures and consolations which neither pleased
nor consoled him; and then Poussette did
not understand at all ; something was wrong,
but what, she could not tell ; yet when the
noon sun lopked in upon his troubled, heavy,
feverish morning sleep it always lighted up
the little form, of Poussette sitting up, mute
but eager, waiting his awakening.

" If there were only a woman like you,
Poussette, who would always bear with one,
and never ask questions ! " said Vallarec to
.her more than once. And his conscience
smote him when he did so, for he had met
such an one once, and he had used her ill.
Poussette did not know what he said, but she
knew that he meant something in her own
praise, and jumped on his knee, and rubbed
her soft ear against his.

One day he became involved in a quarrel.
It had its origin in a trifle, but became em-
bittered into seriousness and ended in his

POUSSETTE,

sending his tdmoins to meet those of his ad-
versary, who was one of the best fencers in
Europe. The meeting was fixed to take
place outside a Belgian town. " It comes
itpropos," he said to himself, for things had
so gone with him that he had only a few hun-
dred francs left in the world, just enough to
take him to the place of meeting, and pay for
his funeral afterward if he were killed. He
believed that he should be killed. He was
superstitious, like all men whose life is haz-
ard. He wished to be killed. He was tired
of the game. He was impatient of the re-
morse and regret which at times assailed him.
For change it was too late. The gold of his
youth had been scattered like dropped sand
behind him. It was not in his power or that
of any other man to gather it up and make it
into coin. He wished to die; he believed,
that he should die; he was an admirable*
fencer, but his opponent was one of the two
or three men in the world who could give
him points. So much the better, he said to
himself; there was only one creature who
would regret him, Poussette.

^ The thought of her possible fate troubled
nim. nfliinfe''' V»«m cXxa iiroo ^^ «-«-_ii ^^ i_- i a

all alone in the world ; they would cart her

If-,

m3. \

POUSSETTE.

rj^«

off to ^fourrthre, or consign her to a torture
table. He had a servant, indeed, a clever
rascal, who had been true to him hitherto be-
cause Vallarec up to this time had been a
master both amusing and indulgent, if often
sorely pressed for money. But he knew his
Leporello to the core, and knew that, he
once dead, the rogue would sell Poussette for
half a bottle of cognac and a packet of cigars.
'^VVhat can I do with you, Poussette?"
he said to her, as she sat on her little hind
legs before, the marble balustrade facing the
sea. In twenty-four hours' time he believed
that he would be lying stiff and stark in a
cay-field in the neighborhood of Lille
What would then become of Poussette?
Who would give her the cream off the coffee-
tray, the truffles off the cutlets, the little white
. roll out of the napkin ? Who would care a
straw whether she lived or died ?

He thought of every friend and acquaint-
ance he possessed, and could remember no
one of whom he could ask so much as to take
care of a little spoilt nondescript dog. The
men would not be bored by such a bequest.
1 he women would promise-oh, yes, they
would promise anything ; but that would be
ail. He had no illusions. He knew that a

POUSSETTE,

beggared man has no friends, and a dead
man has no mistresses.

Then suddenly to his memory there re-
curred the recollection of the one woman
whom he had treated worst of them all.

Marie Desjardins had been one of the most
promising pupils of the Conservatoire, and
had already commenced with success her
public career, when for her misfortune she
had met himself. To please him she had
abandoned her art and sacrificed her future.
He had requited her ill. She had been the
one woman who had loved him as Poussette
loved him. It is the ideal love ; but it is not
the one for which men are often grateful. Its
devotion makes them too sure, and perfect
security begets satiety. Ten years had
passed now since he had left her abruptly
and brutally for a woman who was not worth
the dust which her foot touched on a sum-
mer day. He knew what had become of her.
She was living at a little house which she had
inherited in the small town of Bourg (La
Bresse), and gave the lessons in singing and
recitation: she, who, i*" he had never crossed
her path, might have been one of the idols of

";~ ■= ^ '- '■'-'"•^ niuiocii mac it was not

his fault in any way, that she might have re-

.fe

POUSSETTE.

Jt.-;l

Kr«

\l-

turned to her career had she chosen ; she had
been only twenty then ; but he knew that he
hed to himself when he said so. When he
had left her he had killed the artist in her, as
the bird's song ceases if the bird's win^ is
crippled. ^

" Very likely she had only a small talent,"
he said to himself to stifle his remorse. But
he knew that the reasoning was ungenerous
and that it was untrue, because her talent
had been great, great enough to move the
admiration of the most fastidious of critics;
and the most severe of audiences in the brief
season during which she had been heard at
the Grand Opera. So many years had gone
by since then, years filled for him by the
egotism of a base and destructive passion
He had forgotten her long and cruelly. But
at this moment her memory returned to him.
She had always been gentle and kind to all
creatures ; she would, he felt sure, be good
to Poussette. There was time to turn aside
and go to Bourg on his way to Belgium, and
he went, taking Poussette with him.

It was late in the afternoon when he
reached thai quiet town covered up under its
abundant foliage which was now in the first
.res.^ness Oi earliest summer. He found that

POUSSETTE.

she had
that he
hen he
her, as
wing is

talent,"

^ But

merous

* talent

>ve the

critics,

e brief

iard at

1 gone

3y the

assion.

. But

o him.

to all

good

aside

n, and

en he
ier its
e first
d that

she lived in an outskirt of the Faubourg St
Nicholas, and walked thither. The baseness
of what he was about to do did not occur to
him. To seek a woman out after so many
years only to ask a favor of her was an act
which in another man would have struck him
as odious and mean. But his sense of shame
was lost in his desire to save Poussette, and
moreover the life which he had led had dulled
'his sensibilities and destroyed the finer in-
stincts of human nature in him. He had be-
come indifferent as to whether what he did
were right or wrong, were just or unjust, so
long as it fulfilled his immediate purpose.

The little house in which Marie Desjardins
dwelt was at the end of a grassy lane, deeply
shaded by limes and sycamores. It was
hardly more than a cottage, but it stood in a
large and shady garden of which the odors
of the lilies and the mignonette were blown
on the west wind to him as he approached it.
" You will be well there, Poussette," he said
to the little dog, who was running gayly
along the grass, not knowing the fate which
awaited her. The garden was enclosed by a
high hedge of privet; there was a small

■urnnnf»n nrofo In r\r>c^ »-»«^«- ^f *.U- i i i

.. ^«i-„ in \jii.\^ pai L ui iiic iicuyc ; lie

unlatched the gate and entered, Poussette

POUSSETTE.

' .0l<^'',

I'*.' "~'^\

'f.» tfX

trotting before him, curious as to this new
scene, and delighted with the garden, which
was a labyrinth of blossoms and of boughs.
Rain had fallen in the earlier day, and the
sunshine sparkled on the moisture of every
blade and leaf. The path from the gate
turned suddenly and brought him in sight of
the house itself, old and low with latticed win-
dows and deep eaves where swallows nested,
and a thatched porch buried under tea-roses
and honeysuckle. It was so calm, so fresh,
so innocent, a poem of Verlaine's came to his
mind :

Le ciel est par-dessus le toit
Si bleu, si calme !

Un arbre par-dessus le toit
Balance sa palme.

La cloche dans le ciel qu'on voit

Doucement tinte ;
Un oiseau sur I'arbre qu'on voit

Chante sa plainte.

Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est Id,

Simple et tranquille ;
Cette paisible rumeur-lEl
Vient de la ville.

Qu'as-tu fait, 6 toi que voilil

Pleurant sans cesse ?
Dis, qu-as tu fait^ toi que voiik

De ta jeunesse ?

POUSSETTE,

Verlaine's life had been drowned in the
same swirling waters of vice and folly as his
own.

Out of the fragrant darkness of the path a
woman came toward him: tall, grave, fair,
clad in black. He knew that it must be
Marie Desjardins, and for the first time a
sense of his own monstrous selfishness and
insolence in seeking her out thus came upon
him. Dazzled by the sunshine she looked at
him at the first indifferently, seeing in him
only a stranger ; then, as he drew nearer she
recognized him, the blood rushed to her face
and ebbed away, leaving her deadly pale;
she stood still in the grassy path.

•* You ! " she said, faindy.

Then he felt ashamed. He said nothing ;
only remained where he was, instinctively un-
covering his head. Poussette paused alsc,
with one paw uplifted; puzzled, inquisitive,
dubious.

There was silence between those who lono-
before had been lovers : a prolonged silence
in which the burr of the bees in the chalices
of the lilies and the chattering of the swallows
under the eaves were audible.

They looked at each other, mutuall^- moved
by a strong emotion ; noting how time had

' *',f"i''

POLi:SETTE,

changed them both, him the more by far, for
the woman's calm and simple life, passed in
pure air and healthful pursuits, had kept her
younger than her years. He was the first to
speak. He moved toward her with embar-
rassment, as though he were a boy instead of
a worn-out man of the world.

"I have done wrong to come here," he
said, in a low voice. " I beg your pardon.
Are you—are you— well and happy .? "

" You did not come here to ask me that. I
imagine," she said, coldly: the tone had scorn
in it, but her voice trembled ; his appearance
there shook her i^re as a tree is shaken in a
hurricane.

" No. I came to ask you a favor," he an-
swered, humbly. The enormity of his intru-
sion there seemed to him as he spoke so inex-
cusable, so odious, that he loathed himself.
She did not answer, she did not endeavor to
aid his explanation; she stood under the
drooping tea-rose boughs of her doorway,
mute, cold, still ; as still as though she had
been made of marble.

He looked at her, hoping for some word
from her which might make it easier for him
to continue, but she did not speak. His pres-
ence there seemed to him monstrous, inso-

POUSSETTE.

lent, grotesque, unpardonable. He hastened
to complete his errand and leav<' her in such
peace as she possessed.

" Marie," he said, humbly, and his voice
faltered over her, "this little dog has been
my only friend for seven }'ears. 1 am g' f
on a long journey, I shall never retur. I
know no one who will h^ good to her; I
thought f you ; you were always good."

He paused, made dumb by an unusual
emotion which he could ill control. Pous-
sette looked up in his face as though she
understood ; she was troubled, her tail
drooped. Marie Desjardins did not speak.
Was she offended, he wondered, or touched,
or outraged, or disappointed ? Her counte-
nance and her attitude told him nothing.

" Will you do it ? he asked at length.
" If not— I must kill her."

** Where do you go ? "

" That I cannot tell you."

** It is impossible for her to go with you ? "

" Yes. I do not wish her to suffer."

She was silent again, looking at the little
figure of Poussette, who, anxious, wistful,
and afraid, stood gazing upward in her mas-
ter's face. Then she said, at last • "If "^^ou
be in any extremity and have no other way

pswA^II

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(716)t73-4S03

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if TV,

POUSSETTE,

j~yes~Ieave her here ; I will take care of

Tears rushed into the weary eyes of the
man before her ; he loathed himself in that
moment with a deadliest scorn.
"I thank you," he said, simply.
He lifted up the little dog and pressed her
closely to his breast, and kissed her on her
forehead Then he set her gently down upon
the garden path, and dropped one of his
gloves upon the ground, and motioned to her
to guard it.

folded her little soft forefeet upon it. She
was used to the order; and only her lar^e
hazel eyes, dewy and dilated, expressed her
wonder and alarm at being bidden to stay
thus m an unfamiliar place.

He bowed low before the woman whom he
had wronged, and without any other farewell
with one backward look at her and the little
dog, he turned and went out of the garden
Poussette lay still, obedient and faithful her
paws folded on the glove, a great terror and
a great anguish gazing helplessly out of her
pathetic eyes.

Marie Desjardins. as she heard the click of
- ^ate in the hedge behind him as he

LliC

POUSSETTE.

passed out into the road, sank down on the
bench beside the porch and wept bitterly.
She had long thought her heart dead, and
the peace of the grave her portion ; but now,
lo ! it lived again, and its life was only hope-
less, writhing, poisoned pain. How cruel —
with what refined and insolent cruelty ! — to
seek her out after these many years in her
humble seclusion, and once more banish for-
ever the resignation which she had attained,
the poor pale simulacrum of content which
she had striven to believe was happiness !

He, meanwhile, went on through the blos-
soming brightness of the little tranquil town
and reached the railway station as the train
for the north was about to move ; in another
moment it bore him away from the green and
pleasant places which had touched him for a
moment into passionate regret.

The following day the duel was fought.
Contrary to his presentiment and to all prob-
ability, he wounded his adversary severely
and was not himself touched.

" All luck has left me," he said, bitterly. He
had wished to lose his life ; it was of no use to
him ; he had thrown away all which had made
it worth anything ; an intolerable sense of
fatigue was on him ; even the passion which

POUSSETTE,

-Mill

1 *•"■.„

had been his ruin had ceased to move him
much. Yet he returned to it instinctively,
through habit rather than will.

The thought of Marie Desjardins was oft^n
present to him as he had left her in the green
and quiet garden. He felt glad that Pous-
sette was there, safe with a woman, amon^
flowers and leaves. She would never be
hungry, or tired, or ill-treated ; she would live
out her little life in comfort. But, unknown to
himself, Poussette had been the tie which had
still united him to the simple and healthy
things of existence. Again and again he had
done for Poussette what he would never have
done for himself, ashamed of his softer feeling
but yielding to it for her sake ; that better in'
fluence was now no more upon him, and un-
opposed the viler instincts in him had all their
way unchecked. He missed Poussette as he
had never dreamed that he could miss the pres-
ence of anything. The remembrance of the
httle dog patiently waiting for him in her faith-
ful affection had often made him tear himself
from the gaming tables for her sake, had often
drawn him out for her sake to country places
in the hills and down to the more solitary sea-
shores. Poussette had been the one innocent

thing in his existpnrp wfi.VK k^j u-^j

cs TT.i.x-ix iiovi nau puwer to

POUSSETTE.

ve him
ctively,

IS oft^n
! green

Pous-
among
•^er be
ild live
Dwn to
::h had
ealthy
le had
r have
-eling,
ter in-
d un-
I their
as he
\ pres-
3f the

faith-
imself
often
)laces
r sea-
ocent
'^erto

arouse in him still some unselfishness, and
some emotion besides that of the feverish lucts
of play. He was sincerely glad that she was
where she was, in peace and safety, but he
missed her.

He remained at the tables day and night,
leaving them only for brief intervals when he
was absolutely forced. He had only five gold
pieces when he returned to Monte Carlo from
Belgium ; nothing else in the whole world ;
all that he had possessed was gone to the
devil of hazard ; he had lost everything, even
the miniature of his mother; and he had no
longer any power to compose anything for the
press which would fetch money. There was
an anaemia of the brain upon hin» ; he could
not sustain any line of thought long enough
to write a page.

With his five napoleons which he had staked
at roulette on the evening after the duel, he
had won fifty ; with the fifty he had continued
to play, leaving the roulette for rouge et noir.
At first he won continually, then he lost
largely, then he won and lost in those madden-
ing alternations in the coquetry of which lies
the horrible sorcery of gambling. Play, like
Madame de Maintenon, loves to keep her
wooer ''jamais content, jamais d^.sesperd^*

POUSSETTE.

SaH

until he yields, the king his crown, the gam-
bier his life.

He won large sums, and then played them
back whence they came. Three weeks passed
away thus like one long nightmare. He saw
everything through a red mist, splashed with
black specks. People looked at him in appre-
hension. He had been well known there so
many years, but he had never had this look
upon his face before. He had eaten scarcely
anything all this time, and slept but very little ;
his sleep, such as it was, being only a repeti-
tion of delirious dreams of series and of syn-
dicates which should break the bank. There
was no Poussette to awaken him, with her
litde soft head against his lips, and her low
smothered bark of appeal which said plainly,
*' the sun has risen ; so long, oh, so long ago ! "
He played on and on and on through
twenty days and nights, hypnotized by the
vacillations of chance, getting on his features
a look of almost brutalized imbecility. He had
a vague dominant desire which came now and
again over him ; he thought, " If I could win
a hundred thousand francs I would go back to
Marie Desjardins." He had seen at a glance
that she forgave him, that she loved him ; he
longed for t^'ie rest and comfort of her pres-

POUSSETTE,

ence. As a beggared man he could not go
to her; she was poor as the world counts
money, but she was rich compared to a
cleared-out gambler, to a raU who had not
anything which he could call his own except
the clothes he wore.

That thought, and the memory of the
green, peaceful garden in which he had left
Poussette, swept over him now and then like
the gust of a fresh west wind. Then they
passed away, and he was left to his semi-de-
lirium, playing mechanically and seeing ev-
erything red splashed with black aces. The
authorities of the bank watched him with
uneasiness. He had the look of a man who
would bring a scandal upon it.

It was not so long since the Marquis de Val-
larec had been one of the most noted and ad-
mired figures at Monte Carlo, but now they
knew that he was ruined out and out, and
they watched him as they would have done a
beggar, could a beggar have passed through
their gilded portals. There was a rumor cur-
rent that he had sold his dog for the five na-
poleons which he had brought there last, and
on which he had won at roulette. The story
gained credence, for Poussette was no more
seen

:^»

POUSSETTE,

m-.

®'

K^%

►«

On the evening of the twenty-second day
he lost his last coin.

He looked round him with the desperate-
hunted gaze of a wolf at bay ; understood
that he could stay there no more, and left his
place ; the people who had been nearest him
eagerly closed up around the table, and the
momentary vacuum was filled up without a
second's delay. The game went on uninter-
ruptedly ; the players gave no thought to
Jiim. Only pne of those observers who
watched all which went on, on behalf of the
bank, noting the look upon his face whis-
pered a few words to another person, and
that person followed him at a distance, keep-
ing iiim within sight.

Unconscious of the espionage Vallarec
went out through the glittering halls so fa-
miliar to him, through the gay group of fash-
ionable visitors, through the chatter and the
perfumes and the artificial light, and descend-
ed the stairs into the grounds ; the orchestra
in the concert-room was playing the march
from the " Mage " of Massenet, and the music
echoed dizzily through his brain; he felt
drunk, worse than drunk, imbecile.

He had not a farthing in the world, and
nothing left on which to raise a franc except

POUSSETTE.

the little revolver, ivory-mounted, which he al-
ways carried in the breast pocket of his coat.

He walked on stupidly to the marble bench
set beneath a group of aloes, and sheltered
by mimosas, where little Poussette had so
often waited and watched for him. The gar-
dens were wholly deserted ; he sat down and
leaned his elbows on his knees, and his head
upon his hands. It was a brilliant, starry
night, the sea was throbbing under the moon-
light, the earth was at her loveliest. He had
no eyes for her beauty, he was only devoured
by his own misery.

As he sat thus the emissary who had been
bidden to follow him approached and stood
near, and with a certain timidity murmured
an offer of aid, of money, of any facility de-
sired, if he would leave the principality before
morning.

Vallarec started as if he had been stabbed
by a knife, and rose to his feet.

" For what do you take me ? " he said,
haughtily, staring at the messenger in amaze-
ment ; the words spoken in his ear had been
like a douche of iced water on a brain in stu-
por.

The other man thought doubtless, " I take
you for what you are, a desperate and

Ly»j4*l

POUSSETTE,

)si:

tv:

Z» -.ill

cleaned out gamester," but he was awed by
the tone and the glance of the fallen gentle-
man, and muttered a vague apology. He
did not dare to insist upon the errand con-
fided to him, and slunk away into the
shadows of the shrubs and trees.

Vallarec laughed low and drearily to him-
self.

" They are afraid I shall kill myself on
their territory and get them into evil odor.
They would pay for my transit to Paris, and
perhaps give me a week's board wages as
well— how kind! Genttls seigneurs, I will
leave you a parting gift, the gift of my body,
and if it frighten all your clients away out
of hell, so much the better. My death will
have been of more use than my life."

Then, fearing that he was watched by the
detectives from the Casino, and might be in-
terfered with, he walked slowly away from
. the bench and along the gardens.

He thought of Poussette as he left the mar-
ble seat where she had so often watched for
him, and he felt glad that he had placed her
in safety.

His mind was clearer; the insult of the
offered assistance from the bank had given
him a shock which had cleared away the semi-

POUSSETTE.

insanity of his fury and despair ; he was ex-
hausted both from sleeplessness and want of
food, but he was sane once more. He knew
that he had left in the gaming-hell behind him
his honor, his intelligence, his past, and his
future. What was there left to live for.?
Nothing.

Not even Poussette ! he thought, with a^
weary smile.

Poussette was doubtless at that hour sleep-
ing in the little cottage under the sycamores
and limes of Bourg ; perhaps sleeping on the
breast of the woman whom he had forsaken,
but who had never forgotten him.

** On passe au cdte du bonheur sans le sa-
voir!' he thought, recalling the words of an
author whose name he could not have remem-
bered. How true it was ! he sighed heavily,
thinking of Marie Desjardins as he i^d seen
her first, in the flush and promise of her gifted
and trustful youth.

He walked onward through the gardens
and left them and traversed the lanes which
led to the house where he had his one poor
chamber. The door stood open, for the air
was hot, not fresh and dewy as it had been in
la Bi asse. He went up the staircase unseen
and unheard to his room which was under the

POUSSETTE.

■ ...■«

roof. The little casement of it was also open
and looked out to the sky and the sea.
There was a letter lying on the table, but he
did not notice it. He went straight to his
valise. unlocked it, and took out his revolver •
the pistol case and a little linen were all which
were left in it. He drew the charge and
loaded It again with great care ; he wished to
die at once and without torment. He looked
for a moment out to the silvery skies and the
silvery sea which were the last sights that he
would ever behold. Then he lifted the re-
volver to his temple and felt its chill metal
touch his flesh ; in another moment he would
have been a dead man.

But the door was pushed aside ; a sound of
panting labored breath, and hurrying feet,
came to his ear ; instinctively he laid aside
the pistol, and turned toward the doorway
Covered with dust and mud, dragging her-
self feebly along the floor, making little low
breathless murmurs of delight, Poussette
staggered up to him, strove to lift herself up
onto his knee, and failing, fell back into his
outstretched hands.

She had found her way to him alone from
Bourg to Monaco.

" Mv li«-<^1« ^nVr-' »

iiiy little love !

he cried

PO(/ss£rrs. ,^

to her, raising her bruised starved body in his
arn,s and covering her wistful face with'icisse
Her eyes one mstant gazed up at him in mute
and unspeakable adoration ; then a sigh of a

ZZ T"'" '°^ '^"'■"^ """^^^'l through
her httle form, and with that sigh she died

he"wo„n T""^^ '^^ ''"'■■ 'y'"ff °" 'h« 'able
fro Jr .r '"'" "^^' ^"^^ ''^d been lost

ro n Bourg fifteen days earlier and that all ef-
forts to trace her had been vain. Care affec
t.on, indulgence, con,fort. and repose had been
powerless to reconcile her to exile from her

master; the peace of the peaceful garden had
given no peace to her ; she had never con-

CSS. unhappy, mtolerant of restraint ; separ-
ation however softened and gilded, had been
unendurable to her. Her faithful soul had
kept .ts love within it, and had brooded on its

un;; ""f "r^ 'r ^' ^°'"f°"-d. When oppor.
tumty had made possible her escape, she had
gone out mto the unknown, unfriendly, un-
mercful world, and with her own little wi'i un-
a^ded had found her way back to her beloved.
How she had accomplished her pilgrimage

sman U tr '"°"- A ""le'thig, fo
small, so humble, so defenceles.s, all alone in

..*!■

POUSSETTE.

:'S.

the brazen brutal world of men. Her swollen
and bleeding feet, her emaciated body, her
rain-soaked, mud-cloaked fur alone spoke
piteously of all she had endured. Alone, and
with no guide but what men called her in-
stinct, she had made her odyssey with greater
courage than the great Odysseus himself.

Hunger, thirst, cold, heat, terror, cruelty,
blows, bruises, unsheltered nights, unnour-
ished days, had been her constant portion.
Perhaps here and there one in ten thousand
had seen the little travel-stained trembling
panting thing with some degree of pity, and
had given her a draught of water, a scrap of
bread, a kindly touch. But oftener we may
be sure she had been hooted at and stoned
and left to starve, and always hindered, never
helped ; for she was a dog, a creature only fit
for the furrier's knife or the scalpel and the
poisons and the red-hot iron of the scientific
torturer. The earth had had no pity for her,
and had torn her feet, and chilled her body,
and left her stomach famished ; the heavens
had had no pity for her, and had poured on
her their icy rains, their piercing winds, their
scorching sun-rays, their harsh blazing light
which showed her little creeping figure to the
human devils of the streets. But she had

POUSSETTE.

per^vered; she had found the right way
though strange places and strange^peoX
w. h no defence, no guide, no assistance ; £
only fnend her own indomitable spirit her
only support that great tenacious love which
can move mountains. The same genius
wh,ch steers the swallow straight over deser
and ocean to h.s summer nest bene. . some
northern cave, the same marvellous and m^s!
tenous power which brings the nightingale
year after year, from the reeds of the Nile ^d
the roses of Hisdostan, to the same g ee„
nooks mwood or garden by Arno, Loire or
Thames, had led her along road; she had
never traversed, among crowds unkind and

dread, and lonelmess, and inability to ask for
a.d or p,ty ; and with all the pangs of wan
and fear gnawing at her heart, home here to
the feet of the one man she loved
^ And looking in his face she gave one sigh
of rest and joy : then died.

<^v^'^\ ^^ "° ^"^'■'^°" for such as she
She had spent her little life-her all-lav-
isnly, and unrewarded.
Her grave was made in the o-re^n ^,rd- r,-
-- Could she know, sh? w^uffbe ^^
by her death she saved her master.

iJourg.

tent

Ilii'

RINALDO.

^^^^^^HfifNMjIli '~ .^l

^■IRi^

^^^^■n^^l^ '-'*

^^^^^HEHBRTI: 1

■■■MMKliii

Hip

u|p.!f'--

RINALDO.

San Dominico was, only a few years since,
still a peaceful and poetic place, keeping close
its memories of Dante and Fra Angelico, and
of Boccaccio and of his ladies, and lying still
and shady under the maternal knees of the
Fiesolanian mountains. Its one-arched bridge,
which long ago used to bristle with the lance-
heads of the riders of hawkhood and the reit-
ers of Barbarossa, still spans the stony bed of
the dried-up waters ; and the deep shade of
those cypresses and cedars, which not so long
ago sheltered the leonine head of Savage
Landor, still falls across the sward of his
lawns " * twixt Afric and Mensola." But that
is all that remains of the old pristine loveliness
of the place ; the axe of the peasant, the pick-
axe of the builder, the greed of the money-
grubber, the frightful follies of the jerry-
builder have defaced and devastated it, and
the jangling bells of electric wires break in on

'.-■-S-Hil

104

RINALDO.

Jit's

!A*'

its stillness as the tramway trains scurry on
their noisy way up and down those historic
slopes. Haste, cheapness, and vulgarity —
the three devils which possess the body and
soul of the present age — have come even up
here under the shadows of the wide woods of
Doccia and the topaz and amethyst hues of
the Apennine spurs ; and the green world in
which the lovers and the ladies of the Decame-
rone loitered, and laughed, and made the air
musical with canzone and lute, is no more to
be found save in a few leafy nooks hidden
away behind gray walls, as if ashamed of their
own beauty, in a time which only adores dust
and dirt, hurry and cunning, sham and stuc-
co, quick profits and ill-gotten gains.

In one of such nooks as tLese, which still
hold their place, silvery with olive and dark
with cypress and ilex, there is a small square
stone house, very old, very poor, which leans
up against the back wall of a villa, and has
above it a hill-side of yellow sandstone, and
around it fields intersected by fruit-trees and
maples. The road is far away, and from it
nothing is seen of the hurrying tramway
trains; or the crawling carts which go up
through San Dominico to Fiesole itself The
fields belong to the villa ; and the cottage is

RINALDO.

105

all alone, with a little plot of ground of its
own, and no relationship to its statelier neigh-
bor on the hill.

Its owner is a lawyer in the city, and its oc-
cupants are, or were, a mother and grandson,
with a small female child ; poor people, ex-
ceedingly poor people, who gathered together
with difficulty the one hundred francs a year
which the landlord exacted for their dwelling;
fifty francs twice a year, paid six months be-
fore it was due, after the Florentine custom
and obligation, is a heavy toll on the liveli-
hood of those who labor hardly for every
scrap which they put in their mouths and
every rag with which they cover their bones.

The old woman, Nonna Tessa, as she was
called by everyone, had once been a well-to-
do peasant on that same hill-side, but her son
had been but a boy of twelve when his father
had been killed by a steam-engine running
on the then newly -made railway at the foot
of the hills, and his grandfather had died a
little later of bronchitis and liever one hard
winter time. The land they lived on had
just changed hands when this last death took
place ; the new owner had not been disposed
to leave a good farm to a lonely woman and
a mere boy ; they had received notice to quit

fev?fe-l

• Vi\ »

*-wi

io6

RlhTALDO.

'urn

and had come then to this little cottage to
make a living as best they might. Those
who have been peasants on the same soil all
their lives consider it to be a great downfall
and humiliation when they are forced to be-
come mere day-laborers or hand-to-mouth
gainers of their daily bread. Tessa, who
was a brave and industrious woman, tried
to make ends meet by washing linen, plait-
ing, spinning, and chicken keeping, and the
lad, Rinaldo, worked on the little plot of
ground, and did odd jobs on the farms near,
and at the stables where the diligence horses
were changed, and went into the city on er-
rands for anybody who would so employ him,
and was always cheerful, good-natured, ac-
tive, and gay. It was exceedingly difficult,
however, to make enough to live upon, al-
though their wants were few and their patience
extreme. The years went on, and 'Naldo
grew a man and Tessa an old woman ; and,
as they had not enough for themselves, he
was foolish enough to take a third mouth to
feed. He married, and brought a girl as
poor as themselves to the little stone cabin
above the olive-trees. She was the daughter
of a blind cobbler, and carried with her no
dower whatever except her shining brown

RINALDO.

107

eyes and her broad happy smile. She died
in childbed two years later and left a little
boy behind her, who in his turn was called
Rinaldo, 'Naldo, or 'Naldino, in the mouths
of the country people.

The elder Rinaldo at thirty years old
looked fifty, for he worked so hard and ate
so little ; he was always on his legs and out
in all weathers ; and the soles of his bare
feet were hard as horn, and the skin of his
face and throat was burned brown, and lined
liked a crumpled autumn leaf. But he kept
his gay and pleasant humor to the last, and
was quite content with his lowly lot : he could
run into the city as fast as a hare scuds be-
fore the hounds, and could labor at odd jobs
all the day through on nothing but a bare
crust and a pipeful of tobacco.

His mother, though she said little about it,
never ceased to regret her old life on her
goodly farm. To be only a hind for daily
hire seemed to her a sorry fate for her beloved
son. She could see, across the valley on the
opposite hill-side, the long gray buildings
with their red-tiled roofs> where she had
passed all her early womanhood ; and her
heart was full of longing for them, though
twenty years had gone by since she had

io8

RINALDO.

i!
•J

i;:

come down for the last time through the fa-
miliar fields, her boy carrying their crockery
and hardware upon his back, and she some
hens and a cock under her right arm, and a
big bundle of linen under the left one.

There the place which she had left lay, un-
changed on the sunny mountain side, its blue
smoke curling upward, its gable ends dotted
with pigeon - holes, and brushed by flying
doves ; its peir and peach trees and wal-
nuts standing up thickly all around it, and
yet never More would she sleep under its
roof-tree and reign as mistress in its vast
old kitchens. Another family was there ; a
noisy, numerous, ever . multiplying family
graybeards and beldames, sons and grand-
sons, women of all ages, children of both
sexes. They were good enough people:
honest, steady, laborious ; she never said an
111 word of them, but the pain of her exile
was as great to her as though she had been
driven out from there only a day before, and
the iron of banishment in her soul never
ceased to harry and wound her. If, instead
of marrying that poor, useless, penniless crea-
ture, her son had found a mate in some well-
to-do rural household, perhaps they m.iaht
some day have gone back thither ; who could

RINALDO,

109

say that they would not ? But he had set his
heart on a poor, feckless, friendless lass, and
it had kept him back from ever rising up one
step above the humble lot to which he had
sunk. It was nobody's fault; if anyone's, it
was that of the stupid, newfangled, monstrous
machine which had struck her good man his
death-blow. What would you ? What will
be will be, said Nonna Tessa, with a sigh.
But her handsome boy had become a bat-
tered and weather-beaten man, fixed in his
dull place, like a mile-post in the ground, and
he had been forced to toil, toil, toil on a half-
filled belly all his years, instead of eating
bread from the corn he sowed, and gathering
fruit from the trees he pruned, as he should
have done, and as his fathers and grand-
fathers always had done before him ; and be-
fore he was forty he died of lung disease,
leaving on her hands his young son eighteen,
and a little dark gypsy-like female child, off-
spring of a second and equally improvident
marriage.

'* Never mind, granny," said the younger
Rinaldo, who had grown up tall and fair and
comely. " We are happy as we are, as long
as we can keep the cottage, anu tixere is tue
Morianinina."

F?>>*:V'

liU

%^Y

nil

fir! '<

ill

RINALDO.

He wr?*? really happy, a gfood, cheery,
peaceable, iiu norous, lissome lad, trudging
about in snow and mud, as in sun and wind,
and never thinking of blaming God or man.
The Morianinina, or the little Moor, was his
small half-sister, a bright, quick, brown-faced,
motherless child.

" We have always enough to eat on Sun-
days," he said to the little girl. " Many
poor folks never get a bellyful once, no, not
once in the whole twelve months."

This was the way he looked at life, with-
out being sensible that there was any credit
or courage in his cheerful content, and he
wished the little brown-skinned, black-eyed
Morianinina to share his cheerfulness. Times
were hard; and he was often cold and hot,
pinched by north wind and scorched by noon-
day sun, h angry and tired and wet and ach-
ing, to bed with empty stomach and up at
dawn to begin the day's fatigues afresh ; but
he was happy despite it all. There was the
old grandam, and there was the merry child,
and Rinaldo, ^'hen he knelt and crossed him-
self on the bai -trnes of the church at mass,
said his patenot^e*" lu unafifected gratitude.
While he him«cU had heciuih and strpno-th
while his grandmother was hale and well.

RINALDO,

III

cheery,
udging
d wind,
)r man.
was his
i-faced,

n Sun-
' Many
no, not

, with-

credit

md he

keyed

Times

d hot,

noon-

d ach-

up at

I ; but

IS the

child,

1 him*

mass,

:itude.

^no-fh

— £> — J

well.

while the child was good and merry, he felt
that life was worth the living. He could not
reason about it, nor weigh its claims and fail-
ures as educated people can ; but the sense
of contentment went with him, making his
rough lot pleasant, as a singing brook will
make a steep and stony path seem gay to the
tired wayfarer who treads it.

When the months of February and August
came round in each year, sometimes his heart
did fail him ; they are dreaded months to all
Florentines ; they are the times in which rent
is due. Happy are the possidenti who have
no rent to pay ! Happy are those who own
the roof which shelters them ! Except to
those, the almond blossom of February, the
watermelon of August, bring terror and cark-
ing care with them for all, since they are the
signs of the fatal dates on which the rent
money must be forthcoming, or the home be
broker- i p and lost.

To gather together the six months' rent is
the preoccupation of many a day and night
to the Tuscan poor. The soiled crumpled
paper money is saved so hardly, stored up so
cautiously, visited so anxiously, lest thieves
snoulcl brcatv va and steai it ueiore tue mo-
mentous day of its payment shall arrive !

It v.,

.vs.; ■

I'll

m
W

- (.

■V

112

RINALDO.

When you want anything, everything, all the
days of your life : food, fuel, clothing, boots
and shoes, a shirt to your back, a sheet to
your bed, bread in your pot, meat in your
soup kettle, when maybe a sick woman lies
on your mattress, and a hungry urchin is cry-
ing for a meal, it is hard work indeed, it is an
effort and almost beyond human nature to
amass and hoard up that rent money, and
leave it untouched whatever you suffer. To
do so is one of those agonizing trials of the
very poor whicli none but they can feel and
fathom. The rent was the spectre which
kept Nonna Tessa wide awake in long win-
ter nights when sleep was so much needed
to make her forget her thin coverlet and her
achmg rheumatism. The rent was the night-
mare which haunted the deep noontide slum-
ber of Rinaldo, when he lay at rest in hot
midsummer days among the wheat-sheaves
or the bean-plants, on the grass of a dusty
roadside, or on the straw in a stable loft.

The little stone house had been their home
now for a score of years, dear, sacred, pre-
cious ; if they lost that little hut there would
be nothing for them but to descend to the

life in the hired chamber, sleep on the hired

RTNALDO.

113

bed, all sanctity and privacy gone, all peace
and family seclusion ended. The little gray
stone cottage was the one thing which gave
them dignity in their own' eyes, and gained
them respect from their neighbors : dividing
them by its privacy from the sorrier herd of
tramps and vagrants, and homeless laboring
folk. And every year the same terror lest
they should fail to pay the rent and so lose it
hung over them always ; for were it unpaid,
they knew that the notice to quit would be
served on them without pity, and the cottage
let to others over their heads ; aye, were they
even but a single week too late in payment.
In the winter the diligence helped them to
make up the money ; and in the summer, the
fig-tree. When the roads were bad the
wheels of the vehicles often needed help to
get out of the ruts and mud, and when the
season was good the fig-tree bore a fine crop.
It was the only tree which belonged to them,
standing in their little plot of ground, striking
Its roots far underneath the walls and out to*
ward the fields ; a goodly tree, with white
criteria flowering about its roots in spring,
and the hens and chickens pattering, and the
little brown child playing, beneath its branches
m all seasons.

Kfe-'V-',"-. !tl

■V ! if-,-- '

!f^..-4 if

114

RINALDO.

iiii

Str

itt!

Rinaldo, moreover, had another anxiety at
his heart of which he said nothing to any-
body, but on which his thoughts brooded
long and often. He was twenty-three years
old and he was in love. Higher up on his
hill-side stood a house with one big old ilex-
tree in front of it, and a lonely neglected gar-
den facing the setting sun. The house had
seen better days, and the garden had once
been rich in flower and fruit ; but the one
served now as a dwelling for many poor
families, and the other was now only a wild
tangle of bush and briar, honeysuckle and
elderberry, straggling roses and self- sown
groundsel.

It was an old place, and could have told
many tales of war and rapine, of lust and car-
nage ; and the red tide of conquest had rolled
by it many a day to pour in desolating fury
over the fertile vale below. But the only
thing about it which Rinaldo knew or cared
for was a lancet window high up under its
broad-eaved roof, where the face of his sweet-
heart could often be seen, and a south wall
where the honeysuckle ran riot, on which she
often sat when twilight fell, watching the
lights shine far, far away in the evening
shadows where the distant city lay. She

RINALDO,

was a fair girl with ruddy lips and rippling
hair the color of a fresh-fallen chestnut ; her
fingers were almost always nimbly working
at a tress of straw, and her feet in warm
weather were bare where they hung down
among the grass, for she was wellnigh as
poor as he ; but she was set high above him
in his sight and his mother's, for she was the
daughter of Matteo Lencioni, the Procaccio.'
In the first mild evenings of spring he was
wont to stroll up there while the nightingales
were singing in every clump of bay and
thicket of wild rose, and lean his tired back
against the old house wall, and look up into
his Nita's light hazel eyes, and forget that he
was ragged and hungry and poor, that he
worked like a starved mule, and was never
sure one day of gaining his bread for the
next. He was young, he was strong, he was
sanguine, and though his shoulders ached
and his thighs throbbed with the fatigue of
the past day, his heart was as light in that
evening time as the white petals of pear and
plum blossom, which the wind blew like snow
along the side of the hill.

"She is not for you. She will be never
for you," said his grandmother, often, who
was wiser than he. But he heeded her not ;

ir'
m"

III

II.

il6

RINALDO.

and returned to the light of the gold-brown
eyes as the nightingale returns to the rose-
bush which it built in last year.

In the old ruined garden there was a
shrine with a stone Madonna and child half
hidden in honeysuckle, and the long, dark-
green tresses of capsicums ; and there timid-
ly, furtively, he and she plighted their troth
to each other. They Were never wholly
alone, someone was always within earshot ;
the house held many women, and one or
other of them looked after the girl when her
father was away. But like all lovers they
were quick and fertile in. invention, and es-
caped observation now and then; and one
dusky evening, when the moon was only a
slender crescent, and the mountains and the
clouds were blended in one, and the only light
was a glow-worm's under a cabbage leaf,
they were unnoticed for a few moments, and
he said, tremblingly, " If I might tell thee ? "
— and she said, wistfully, " If I might hear
thee ? " — and without more words they kissed
each other and then knelt down in the wet
grass, and asked the Mother of Love to smile
on them.

rough as their labors^ coarse as their food;

RINALDO,

117

Rinaldowas not better nor gentler than his
fellows. But in that moment, before the Ma-
donna's shrine, he, poor, simple, dull toiler as
he was, became for a moment a poet.

He took up the little glow-worm out of the
grass, and held it tenderly in his hands.

"I am poor as this little worm," he said,
with a quiver in his voice. " But there is a
great light in my heart as in his ; it shines
through the blackest night ; it is my love for
thee."

Then he set down the little beast, and left
It to creep on unmolested under the honey-
suckle coils, and he held the hands of Nita
clasped in his own against his breast.

" They say that the ladies in the town wear
precious stones that glitter like that worm "
murmured the giri, as her eyes followed the
pale-green light beneath the leaves.

Rinaldo let go her hands.

His mind was not awake or analytical
enough to know why it was that the words
jarred upon him in his momentarily exalted
and emotional mood ; but they disappointed
him and chilled him.

'' Women's thoughts are always with gew-
gaws," he reflected, sadly; and he, alas ! he
would not be able to buy her even a sham

■.iM

Ii8

RINALDO.

y|l< '

ifi

^ii-

i!''

t8> ; : ,

til'

gold chain or a string of little seed pearls,
but only a plain brass hoop for a wedding-
ring. A wedding-ring ! The mere idea of it
brought him down from his ardor and dreams,
and set him face to face with harsh facts.

Would ever Matteo let him stand with her
before the altar ?

Matteo was good-natured and cordial with
him whenever they met, but between that
kind of good fellowship and the acceptance
of him in a closer relationship there was
a wide difference ; and that he could ever
bridge over the difference between them
seemed to him hopeless. But his temper
was sanguine, and love is always confident in
its own rights and triumphs. It looked like
madness, indeed, for him to dream of it : he
who had the old woman and the small child
to keep, and little or nothing on which to
keep them or himself. But such improvident
unions are made every day, the lovers trust-
ing to chance and their own right hand to
get them bread and set a roof over their
heads. If prudence ruled the world, the
priesthoods would have but little to do so far
as the sacrament of marriage would go.

RInaldo was no sillier or more selfish than
his fellows when he said to himself that he

RINALDO.

119

would try and win her father's consent to his
suit. With a timid spirit but a hopeful heart
he saw the old man the next forenoon stand-
ing gloomily at the side of the road, watching
the laying of wires and plantings of posts for
an electric railway along the highway which
he had trodden so many thousands of times
in fair weather and in foul.

The old Procaccio was a small, gray, bony
man, worn very thin in the incessant move-
ment which his calling entailed, and battered
and browned by exposure till his skin was
like a shrivelled yellow leaf of December.
He had been a cheery, humorous companion
in the days of his youth and earlier manhood,
but things had gone ill with him, and now
that his teeth were few and needed tender
meats, he had to eat more bare dry crusts
than in his boyhood, when they had been as
strong and white and sound as a young
dog's, and had oeen able to crack and crunch
plum-stones and almond-shells. The sense
that life, like food, grew daily scantier and
harder to him, made his temper bad, and his
words bitter. He had always been a man of
mark among his fellows, and now of later
years he knew that he had lived too long,
and this knowledge soured him.

120

RINALDO.

The Procaccio is a man who does the er-
rands of a district, or of a commune, carry-
ing letters and parcels, buying small articles
on commission, taking messages to and fro
for the country people who are too busy to
go on such errands themselves ; at once
carrier and postman, go-between and ambas-
sador, pedlar and agent, gossip and money-
changer. He is out in all weathers, foul
or fair; he usually trots on sturdy legs,
grown by habit as quick in movement as if
they were made of mercury and steel ; he is
always fond of gossip, and generally fond of
wine when he can get it, which is often, for
no one grudges him a glass ; he knows the
affairs of all the country-side, their loves and
hates, their ways and means, and though
very generally he cannot read, he never by
any chance makes a mistake in the delivery
of what is confided to him. In the districts
which have no regular communication with
the towns except through him, he is a person
of importance, more esteemed and more
trusted than the postman, almost as much so
as the priest. In the Fiesolanian highways,
diligences and tramways have already robbed
the Procaccio of his proud position, and ren-
dered him almost a nullity, but still in out-

RINALDO,

121

lying hamlets and in the more distant nooks
and spurs of the hill-side he is the person most
employed and esteemed whenever there is
any errand to be done or message carried.

The old man who had been the Mercury of
these hills above San Dominico, in days
when the lordly travelling carriage of rich
strangers and the strings of charcoal or bag-
gage wagons were the only vehicles moving
up and down the curves and inclines of its
roads, had been in his early years in inces-
sant request and employment, carrying many
written and oral communications, and bend-
ing under the weight of numerous packets
and parcels and small boxes. To many a
household along that sunny mountain slope
his going and coming had been the sole con-
nection which they had ever had between
their own ingle-nook and the world which
lay beneath the glittering vanes and empur-
pled domes of the city which they could see
in the plain at their feet,

Where white and wide,

Washed by the morning's water-gold,

Florence lay stretched on the mountain side.

'* Folks were happier in those days," said
old Matteo, with the obstinacy (or the wis-

jiat-rfr ,_ ..-Id

V'*l

122

RINALDO.

dom) of old age ; " they bided at home, and
stuck to their own soil, and ate and drank
the food and the drink which they had baked
and brewed with their own hands. They
were not always careering along strange
roads, and swilling stinking chemicals, and
spelling out rubbishy news-sheets, and bother-
ing their brains with other people's business
as they all do now. If they had a letter writ-
ten for them it was really because they had
something to say, and if they had anything
bought for thtem they gave sound silver
pieces, and they got sound solid goods in re-
turn. A man's Sunday jacket of velvet would
wear a lifetime then, and so would a woman's
woollen gown. Now it is all cheap and rot-
ten ; easy to come by and quick to go ; fine
as poppies and nasty as stinkwort ; from the
stamped cottons the wenches wear to the
dried weeds the lads stuff in their pipes, it is
all cheap and rotten, cheap and rotten, and the
stomachs turn and the heads turn with them.
What do the trumpery clothes, and the doc-
tored drinks, and the hurry and scurry, make
of the folk ? Poor, bow-legged, weak-kneed,
gawky chings who must get up behind a steam-

wool, every time they want to stir a step from

RTNALDO.

123

ftv;;;~ 1

their doors. In my days men were up at red
of dawn and trotting sturdily from hill-top to
town gate, never dreaming of wanting other
help than Shanks's mare, and back again by
sunset or by moonrise with their business
done; the sweat on their foreheads indeed,
but not an ache in their whole body. Nowa-
days, Lord love you ! only see the shame of
it ! They must all huddle together in a pen
behind a smoking chimney, and be carried
wherever they want to go, cooped up and
cramped like fowls in a crate too small for
them. Do you wonder the lads are stunted
and bandy-legged ? Do you wonder the
women frizz their hair up in a touzled clout,
and so long as they have a smart brooch on
their breast, never care that they've holes in
their stockings and a rag for a shift ? In my
days the girls wore the flax and the wool
which they spun, and the boys footed the
highroads merrily on their bare feet."

"Father cannot forgive the iron horse,"
said his daughter.

When first the iron lines had been laid
down in the centre of the roadway for the
iron horse to run on, Matteo had stood for
hours together staring at the men laying the
woodwork and the metal rails between the

124

RIIVALDO,

L*!J

•'■•li

hedges of elder and briar-rose; seeing in
those ugly bars and wires the ruin of his own
small calling and the greater ruin of the peo-
ple's heaUh and manliness.

" What a poor thread-paper creature a man
must be who cannot tread his score of miles
on his own two legs ! " he said now, with the
natural scorn of one who all his life had gone
to and fro in all weathers untiringly.

"Are ye all born cripples?" he said bit-
terly to the lads who were like him watching
the laying of the metals for the electric folly
which was to replace his old foe the steam
one. "Are ye all come into the world with-
ered, like a dry gourd, or lame like a shot
quail, that ye must need lightning to carry ye
up and down over your own native hills ?
The mothers that bare ye must blush for you !
Before I would waste a groat on that new
hobby I would wear the nails off my toes on
the stones ! "

The lads laughed, lazy like all their genera-
tion, and to tease him said that they would be
able to save the price of the fares in the shoe
leather which the aew steed would spare them.

" Wear the soles of your natural feet as
thick as hide like mine and vf» wr»n'«- r\f^t^i\
shoes at all," said the old Procaccio, setting

HIJ^AIDO.

125

his bare heels down on the flint and mud of
the road, heels made so tough and horny by
long walking that they could tread sharp
stones unfelt, and crush a scorpion unstung,
and stamp down an adder's head at a blow.

" Well, we shall save time by the steam
wagon at any rate," said one of the younger
men.

"What is the use of 'saving 'time when
you do nothing good with the time } " re-
torted Matteo, scornfully. " What do you do
when you get down in the city ? Burn your
stomachs with made-up wines in chemists'
shops, and your mouths with chopped dung
which you call tobacco ? Stare at the lottery
offices and buy a dream-book at the wizard's .?
Your legs would take you down to the town
full soon enough for any good you do there."

Rinaldo, who was standing near, said tim-
idly, "There is not much time saved by these
steam brutes either. I can cross country to
town quicker than they can run, taking into
account all their stoppages and accidents.
I beat the Sesto tram-cars the week before
last ; beat them clean by fourteen minutes."

The Procaccio nodded approvingly and
^ — i^..^ ,,.111 |yi,„aoUic Ql Lfic Sinewy limbs
and steel-like muscles of the younger man.

.?!,-

'Hi

m^'

fnfi

^p**

fin

m3«

126

RINALDO,

" You'll be Procaccio after me, 'Naldo, if so
be as any Procaccio is wanted at all in times
to come," he said with a friendly nod as he
walked away on his sturdy old legs with his
head hung down and his heart heavy.

" The lads ar.d lasses will always be go-
ing gadding to city," he muttered, " and the
pence will burn their pockets till they're spent,
and the soup will burn the pipkin at home,
and the worm will eat his fill in the weedy
fields- Gadabouts never kept house well
nor well dre^ plough yet, since the world
was made."

And he went mournfully away, weighted
by his prescient sense of youth's inferiority,
and by the burdens of his own old age.

In his earlier manhood he had made ends
meet very regularly and fairly, for his services
were in constant demand and were amply
paid: food was then cheap, wine was then
wholesome, and life was then easy. But an
open-air occupation is apt to leave a man
stranded in old age when rheumatism stiffens
his joints, and those changes which others
call progress carry the tide of existence be-
yond him, and leave him altogether aside like
an old hulk bedded in a beach.

Some employment old Matteo still got, but

RINALDO.

127

people thought him rusty and slow, and were
apt to give their post-bags and their parcels
to the conductor of the tram -wagons.
Those whose farms and cottages were high
up above the main road, were still glad of
his services indeed, but to do their errands
took him far and long, and, although he hated
to confess it even to his own thoughts, his
knees refused to mount those steep paths an^
stony ascents which in other days had been
no more trouble to them than they are to the
limbs of the goat.

On this day Rinaldo followed him, and
overtook him and touched his arm.

" You spoke well and truly," he said, shyly,
for he was always in awe of Matteo. " The
calling is gone all to pieces with these steam
beasts on the roads, and the folks all flying
here, there, everywhere, every day. And I
fear me you find the hill-work try you sorely
now you are no longer so young as you were.
If you would like me to do it for you I would
with pleasure, and you need not give me a
penny; it would be all done for friendship
and good-will."

Matteo turned and looked at him. " It is
only a fool or a trickster who works unpaid,"
he said, ungraciously.

*'jii'.

A ^ '

mm.

icS

RIJSTALDO.

Rinaldo colored to the roots of his fair
curls. " I am neither, and you know it, good
friend," he said, simply. " I have time on my
hands, worse luck for me, and I will gladly
go for you wherever it tries your strength to
go."

" Humph ! " said the old Procaccio, doubt-
fully. " You mean you will slip into my
shoes when my feet are laid shoeless in
mother ^arth ? "

" I was not thinking of that," said the
younger man, fruthfully. '* If I can be of use,
use me. I am only a poor devil, but I am
strong, as you know ; and the people's pa-
pers and money will be as safe with me as
they are with you."

** Oh, as for that, everyone knows you are
an honest fellow," answered Matteo. " No
one ever said otherwise. But a motive you
have in your fine words ; there is always a
motive in a man's smooth words, just as there
is the sting as well as the honey in a bee's
tail. Out with it, lad ! Didn't I say to you
just now that if any Procaccio at all is wanted
after me you're the best fitted for it of them
all?"

redder, stammered and was mute ; pulled his

RINALDO.

lis fair

:, good

on my

gladly

gth to

doubt-
to my
ess in

id the
of use,
t I am
e's pa-
me as

ou are
"No
ve you
irays a
> there
L bee's
to you
granted
them

£»«• O »^ J

led his

129

hat off his curls and put it on again ; kicked
up the pebbles on the hill-side path, plucked
off a bit of bryony and nibbled it aimlessly ;
then gathering up all his

The

courage m a rush
is — I love your

he muttered :
daughter."

" I feared as much," said old Matteo,
gruffly, in a tone which fell like a stone on the
warm and trembling hopes in the younger
man's breast.

" Lord love ye ! " he added furiously, stand-
ing still in the road; "are ye mad, crazed,
daft, my lad ? Be these times for marrying
and giving in marriage ? Could Nita and you
make up wherewithal to be sure of a loaf?
Are you not beggars both ? Have I not lived
from hand to mouth all my years, and do not
you do the same ? Love ! Love ! Go to,
you poor fool ! Will love fill your soup-pot
with beans or give you oil to moisten your
crust ? You are a personable boy, and she a
comely wench, but will good looks last long
in foul fortune ? Can a shapely body be fed
upon air ? Holy blood of Jesus, save me !
Was ever such madness known? My girl
has hardly a rag to her back, and this lad is
as lean as a church mouse, and has one old
woman and a mere babe to keep as it is ! "

'Mm

130

RINALDO.

"Nita loves poor Morianinina," said Ri-
naldo, very humbly.

" Wenches always say that beforehand,"
grunted the Procaccio.

" I am sure it is true," said the younger
man, "and the little child loves her: who
would not ? "

" Do you call that love, jackanapes," said
Matteo, harshly, " to lead a young woman to
a fireless hearth, a breadless platter, a bed of
dry leaves, and a house chock-full already ?
Love ! a pack, of selfish rottenness and vil-
lainy ! Get out of my way with your lies and
your trash ! "

Rinaldo's face grew pale under its ruddy tan.

"That is harsh, Matteo," he said, with pa-
tient temper. " Is Nita so well off now that
she may not come to need a stout arm to
work for her ? You know best whether she
is or not. But I fear— I fear "

" You hope, you mean," said the old man,
harshly. " If my lass were as I should have
been able to keep her twenty years ago, it is
not the like of a poor boy such as you who
could pretend to her. Nay, nay, 'Naldo," he
added in a gentler tone, for he saw the pain
and aixronu wnicn ixe nau given expressed on
the young man's candid and guileless counte-

RINALDO.

13'

nance. " Nay, it is no crime to be a poor
man ; poor am I, and poor I shall always be,
and the very foot-paths we tread are no more
our own ; and from bad to worse we shall all
go. But to wed in poverty is to triple it ; and
if there be not bread for one eater, why risk
the bringing of more hungry mouths into a
world chock-full as it is ? Put this thing out
of your mind, my lad. Nita is no more for
you than if she were a king's daughter.'*

" I did not think you so harsh, Matteo,"
said Rinaldo, his eyes filling with tears as he
spoke.

** One is cruel to be kmd," said the old
man, whose heart was kinder than his words,
and who had a soft place in it for this well-
built simple fellow who strode over the
ground with such a lithe firm step as recalled
to the old Procaccio the days of his own
youth when he had gone from hill to valley as
easily as a swallow sweeps from mountain
tower to city caves. The girl might do still
worse, he knew; she might take up with
some loon from the town who would mew her
up in a stifling garret, and leave her in rags
while he drank in wine-shops. He glanced
doubtfully at the poor suitor who had already
a mother and a babe to maintain.

V>" ■ "i

-'ik*

« »

132

RINALDO.

%
"i

IK*

"If you were only in regular work," he
said, with a little relenting in his tone. " But
no, no, not even then," he added, hastily ; " I
cannot give my girl to misery, and there are
warm men and solid ones wanting her as well
as yoa "

" So I know," said Rinaldo, humbly. " But
she favors me more than those."

" Men are always dupes and dolts with no
more head than a pin," said the old Procac-
cio, harshly. " She will walk with you, talk
with you, and la^gh with you, but she will do
no more, mind that."

"And the errands ? May I not help you ?
You are not strong as you used to be," said
the younger man, with a sound like a sob in
his throat.

" There are few errands to do, and those
few, please the saints, I will do myself still for
many a year," said Matteo, offended and in-
furiated at the youngster's persistent and ill-
judged reverence to his own age, while he
thrust his ash staff angrily down on a heap of
broken granite on the road ; no man likes to
have it taken for granted that age or infirmity
unfits him for his daily calling.

Then he turned round and looked the
young man full in the face.

RINALDO.

133

" You poor blind simpleton I You think
you know my girl ? Because she has pretty
yellow eyes, and red lips that pout and smile,
you think she will sing you a love song all
the summer, and all the year ? Pooh ! get
out with you for a fool ! Nita is no shep-
herdess of a moon-sung stornello to be fed
on the mere pipings of a wooden flute. When
she gives herself for good she will want in
return a silk gown on her back and baked
meats on her platter. When you are older
you will find out that women are all like this.
Don't fret. You are a good lad. Put this
nonsense out of your head and I will forget
all about it, I promise you, and will speak a
fair word for you with the neighbors so that
you shall stand in my shoes when I be
gone."

Then he would hear no more of his daugh-
ter, were it ever so, but struck across the
fields with a gesture as though he waved
aside some importunate gnat which teased
him; and Rinaldo was left alone, his heart
throbbing with anger and sorrow.

He went with a sick heart home to his
cabin under the fig-tree. The child ran to
meet him with joyous cries, and the old wom-
an laid by her distaff and smiled all over

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134

RTNALDO.

her wrinkled sunburnt face, but he put them
both gently aside and sat down on the rough
bench by the door, with a heavy sigh.

" You have spoken out, and had * Nay '
from Matteo ? " asked Tessa, anxiously.

Rinaldo nodded, and his head drooped
lower and lower on his chest.

'• I knew how it would be," muttered his
grandmother. " My boy, what could any man
in his senses say otherwise ? Is this a house
to which to bring home a bride 1 "

" She is ill off as she is \ she is used to want
and to work." *

"Ay, but want and work with children
tugging at your breasts, and your breasts
empty and dry from want of food — that is
worse. Matteo does well to save her from
knowing it ; a girl does not think of a wom-
an's woes."

" How would it be with her if he died to-
night ? "

" He wishes her well placed, so that when
he dies he may die in peace."

" A woman is well where her heart is."

" Nay, not if her body pine."

She herself knew all the long slow dreary
toil and pain ; the days which were all alike.

the nights wakeful from hunger and sorrow.

RINALDO.

135

the carking care of ohildren when there was
no milk to still their cries, the wearing dread
of the morrow, the ever-present sense that
all industry, all travail, all prevention, all sac-
rifice, would not at the end prevent the lonely
and unpitied death on the wayside stones
like the death of a starved stoat.

To him, despite all hardships, the possibil-
ities of the future seemed fair; but to the old
peasant who had sixty years behind her, life '
had been but a hard taskmaster.

Suddenly she turned her dim watery eyes
upon him.

" If I went from you," she said, slowly, '* if
I went elsewhere, maybe you would have
room for the girl. I can go— somewhere—
anywhere, uid you will be free, my lad. To
be sure you must keep the child ; but may-
hap she would not mind that. It is I who
am in the way."

Rinaldo started to his feet ; a sense of his
own selfishness smote him with remorse.
He laid his hands tenderly on Nonna Tessa's
shoulders.

"Never while I have breath," he said, with
warmth. " Never, oh, never ! Oh, granny !
could you think it of me that I would earn
Paradise itself at the price of seeing you take

136

HIATAL DO.

your old bones amongst strangers? You
have been good to me all my days. Whilst
I have bit or drop for myself you shall share
them. Matteo is a just man if hard ; he would
never ask me to do such a vileness."

"It would be human nature," muttered the
old woman. "When the foal grows a colt
he wants his dam no more ; he goes to frolic
with the mares in the pasture. I am only a
drag on you, my lad, though it may not be
for long."

" May it be years and years," said Rinaldo,
with sincere fervor. " If your seat were
empty, granny, there would be an empty
place in my heart, and it would ache and ache
and ache, and no smile of woman would still
it. What we have seen from our cradle we
want till we get to our graves."

"And that is true, my lad," said Tessa,
gravely, for there was always within her the
yearning for her old home, so near, there, over
the side of the hill, and yet, to her, lost for-
ever.

" Jump me, 'Naldo, and do not cry ! " said
the little brown baby, pressing her curly head
to his knees.

Rinaldo, always good - natured, lifted the
child above his head and swung her up into

RTI^ALDO.

137

the white blossom'nnr boughs of a young pear-
tree among the tender green and against the
bright blue sky. The white pear flowers, the
dark, ruddy child's face, the blue radiant air,
made a glad picture above his head, but he
saw it dimiy through his tears.

The old woman, the little orphan, the lowly
home, these were his portion, in these his duty
lay; he felt that never would there come
thither to him the girl who sighed for the
stones which shone like the glow-worm. She
had kissed him in the moonlight among the
honeysuckle flowers under the Madonna's
placid smile, but she would never share his
daily lot.

Matteo had spoken, and believed, with the
credulous self-sufiiciency of age, that his mere
word would suffice to put out the marsh-fires
of an imprudent and unwelcome love. He
rated his daughter soundly, and threatened to
mew her up in a convent if she dallied and
toyed with a penniless lad like the one whom
she now favored ; he watched her sharply
for a few weeks, and sent her to her room at
nightfall, and took away the pence she made
by her plaiting ; but after a little time his zeal
cooled, and he forgot to look after her in the
long light evenings of the early summer,

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138

RTIVALDO.

or to learn what she did in the days of his
absence, when he was trudging along the hill-
sides or through the streets and lanes of the
city.

In such hours she and Rinaldo met as
lovers ever have done since the world was
young ; met hastily, furtively, fearfully, but all
the more sweetly for that. The soft owls flit-
ting through the shadows, and the nightingales
singing under the bay-leaves, were their ac-
complices and confidants, and kept their se-
cret. Anita, when she went with her father to
mass, her goldeh eyes cast down, and her re-
bellious hair plaited and wound close to her
head, looked the most docile and shy of
maidens ; and the old man was satisfied that
she obeyed him in letter and spirit.

" Nip a folly in the bud and it is done with,
without fret and fuss," he muttered to himself;
complacently, assured of his own shrewd wis-
dom.

" You need only be firm with children to
bend them just as you choose," he said aloud,
with perfect contentment, to the priest of the
church of San Dominico, who, having seen
farther than he into the darkened mirror of
the human soul, gave but a qualified ac<^.ent to
the opinion.

Rfh^AT.DO.

139

The working days were always full from
April to November ; and when the sun went
down behind the opposite hills, leaving a dull
gray haze of heat spread all over the valley,
Rinaldo was so tired out this midsummer that
it was only the wings which passion lends
which could have borne him up the hill-side
on the chance of hearing the girl's naked
feet come brushing the dry grasses of the
foot-path while the night crickets chirped
shrilly to the moon. It was only a chance,
and five nights out of seven he would watch
and wait for nothing, for if her father sat smok-
ing on the wall, or the women who lodged
there were loitering and chatterincr in the road,
she could not steal away unsocn, but was
forced to sit patiently by the old man's side
plaiting her strands of straw till the ninth hour
tolled from the church clocks down in the vale
below, and lights were put out and house
doors bolted.

These hill-sides in spring and summer even-
ings have infinite repose and beauty in them.
They have the solemnity of the mountains and
the softness of the plains. The curves of the
many mountain spurs fold and slope tenderly
into each other in dream-like confusion and
harmony. Beneath the cloud-like foliage the

**^^'' '"■ 'I

^'i\

140

RINALDO.

nightingales sing and the owl hoots. Until
the moon rises, swallows hunt circling through
the shadows, and bats, their mimics, wheel and
whirl in rapid gyrations which have not the
swallow's grace and calm. Distant voices
echo now and again from hill to hill, coming
from forms unseen. The scent of pressed
thyme, of bruised bay, of fallen rose-leaves, is
everywhere upon the air. Against the lumi-
nous sky cypress groves and ilex woods rise
black and solemn, holding the secrets of dead
gods and murdered men within their depths.
The months bf summer were the busiest of
the year to Rinaldo.

In summer all those whose labors are ir-
regular and gains uncertain are in request
and can be sure of occupation froni sunrise to
sunset. There is water to be fetched in
casks for lands which are springless ; there
is hay to be mown and stacked, and grain to
be reaped and threshed ; there are errands to
be run for the idle people who are basking in
the villa gardens ; there are hedging and
ditching, carting and marketing ; there are not
hands enough on any of the farms for the
field work then, and any man who is hardy
and useful m.ay be sure to make his day's-
wage every day and to get his meals as well

RIMALDO.

141

from the peasants with whom he works. In
the summer there can be saved up and laid
by enough to pay the autumn house rent, and
something too left in store for the hard mid-
wmter weeks. But this summer his joys and
his fears troubled his reason ; he set his
sheaves head upward, which is never done
in this country ; he left the bung out of his
water-barrel, so that he arrived with it emp-
ty, and once when he was sent into the city
for groceries, he brought salt for rice and
soap for sugar. But his neighbors knew that
he was moonstruck with his first love, and
laughed at him and forgave him.

The days were long and hot and toilsome,
but the noonday rest was good when sleeping
m the shade of a stack or a hedge, and the
evenmgs, though his limbs ached *and his
stramed sinews throbbed, were fiMed with
that delighted expectation which is the lovers'
heaven.

His grandmother saw his distraction with
a quaking heart ; but she was afraid to say
much lest it should look as though she were
selfishly afraid for herself and the child.
After all, she thought, this fever would pass
hke all such midsummer madness ; Matteo
would never give his daughter to a poor lad ;

142

RINALDO.

no real harm would be done ; such love-crazes
blow away into air as the golden dandelion
flower changes into snowy gossamer, and
melts away upon a puff of wind.

Rinaldo was sure that his love was re-
turned, but that knowledge, though sweet,
could not content him. The brief twilight
meetings, the hurried words, exchanged in
fear- and trembling, were but meagre food for
his passion and left him discontented and dis-
consolate, and he had aii uneasy sense of the
coquetry Und capriciousness of Nita's nature.
Many a trifle showed it to him, blind though
he was with the glamour of illusion. The first
figs which were ripe on his tree he gathered
one day, and put in a basket with green
leaves, and carried to her at twilight. She
smiled, and set her white teeth in the rosy
pulp of one, but she said, with a grumbling
little sigh, " If it were only the precious stone
like the glow-worm's lantern ! "

Rinaldo sighed too, more heavily, for he
would have given his right arm to be able to
hang her about with all those collars and arm-
lets of glittering gems of pearl, of coral, of
silver, of gold, which he saw whenever he
d the goldsmiths' bridge in the city.

•* Look you, Naldino," she said, coaxingly,

RINALDO.

143

"Nerino's Maria has had such a nice brooch
from her damo ; a big, big thing, all colors
and rays and set round with golden flowers ;
and yet he is poor, quite poor, as you know \
he is only a working smith, but he loves her
—yes— he loves her ! "

"Not as I love you, my xNita," said Rinal-
do, stung with jealous hatred of the shoeine-
smith. ■ ^

" Humph ! " said the maiden, doubtfully
and she threw aside the fig which she had
tasted and felt the g smooth skins of the

others doubtfully. '• i hey are not ripe," she
said, slightingly ; - you may take them back
to your old sow at home."

" They were the first of the year," stam-
mered Rinaldo, " and I wanted so to brin-
you something." **

" One can gather figs as one walks in this
month anywhere," she answered, unkindly
" It IS not hard unripe windfalls which you
would bring to me if you were like Maria's
Nerino ; it would be something solid and fine
and worth showing. Maria s Nerino sold his
Sunday coat to buy that brooch ! "

And she began unkindly to cast fig after
fig down the grass path, putting a cruel scorn
of the humble gift into the careless action

M0A

•.■jS.'%i-l»

k^r^- 1

J- ■;''•■»■■

144

RINALDO.

" Your father said I was a fool to think you
would be true to me ! " said Rinaldo, with a
sharp anguish at his heart.

" Did father say that ? " she asked, with a
passing smile.

" Aye, truly, he did ; he said you would
want a silk gown on your back and roast
kid on your platter ! And alas, alas ! my dear,
I shall never be able to give you aught save
a cotton print and a dish of beans, and per-
haps not always even that ! "

Anita was mute, rolling to and fro one of
the despised fi^s with her foot.

" If you were alone we could do well
enough," she murmured.

" Alone ! "

" Ves ; as you ought to be. If your grand-
mother went away and the child, we could do
well enough ; father would come round then."

Rinaldo grew very pale.

" You know," he said, in a hushed tone,
"they are part and parcel of me: if I die
they must do as they can, poor souls, but
while I live I am theirs, they are mine. Why
will you say such cruel things, Nita? You
do not mean them."

i \X\j iiicaii LutiUi. ii yOu i\/v'^»a iiiv- -^xj^jl

would see as I see, you would have no

((

RINALDO.

145

thought but of me ; if you loved me you

would get rid of the old woman and the child,

then you could come and live with us, and

take up father's business after him, and we

should be as happy as the day is long ; but

you do not love me ; you are only made of

words, words, words— and unripe little figs ! "

And she kicked the basket over with her

small bare toes, laughing sulkily, and set the

fruit which remained in it tumbling among the

grass.

" Oh, Nita I " he cried, with a cry of such
pain that it stopped her in her unkind, trivial
sport.

She looked at him, and her golden eyes
shone with pleasure at her power. She threw
her arm about his throat and laid her cheek
against his for a moment. " I was only jok-
ing, and father is a fool," she whispered.
"But bring me a brooch like Nerino's Ma-
rias, for I cannot sleep for the envy of it ;
and then we will wait like good children for
what may happen, ar d the Madonna will be
kind, and smooth the way for us ! "

" If you loved me you would not care for
gew-gaws.! " he said, sadly, his whole being
yielding to the seduction of her caress, bu^t
his reason chiding and doubting her greed.

,.*x%i ^•, - 'a

m'my-'i\

146

RINALDO,

" Bring me them and you shall see ! " said
Anita, sliding out of bis hold, and flying down
the hill through the gloaming, as a hare scuds
under the dark leaves when she hears a dog
stir, for she heard her father calling from the
road below.

Rinaldo stood and looked down on the
poor, despised green fruit trampled into pulp
in the grass. A *^ague, hateful sense of what
her father had meant in speaking of her came
upon him, but he thrust its doubts away. All
women were vain creatures, so all the ballads
and fables said. She was not more so' than
all the others ; she was young and foolish,
and wanted to enjoy one of those little tri-
umphs which are so dear to the female heart.
He was her damo, though their wooing was
secret ; to whom should she look for g'^ts if
not to himself? And he had never been able
to give her anything ; not even a blue ribbon
for her hair, or a silver gilt circlet for her
ears ! He had thought that she would un-
derstand and would not mind, knowing as she
did how things were with him. But it was
natural that she should despise the fruit and
think meanly of him.

Suddenly the girl looked back, returned,
and laughed in his melancholy and tragic

lUlfALDO.

face; she paused a moment before him
caught up one of the figs, nibbled at it for an
mstant, and then thrust it against his hps

" I have made the sour thing sweet for
you, my sulky one ! " she said in his ear •
and then darted away through the gloom.'
Kmaldo passionately kissed the fruit where
ner lips had touched it.

" If only we could go before the priest ' "
ne said more than once restlessly. But it was
impossible. No priest would have dared to
wed them secretly and without the consent
ot the father and the preface of the civil rite

In the old time he hau heard tell, that if
two lovers only kneeled down in church or
chapel at high mass during the elevation of
the Host, and joined hands and pledged
themselves, it made a marriage solemn and
bmdmg, though secret. But those days were
over. Love, like all other things, was caught
and caged and clipped, numbered, registered,
and licensed, and made to pay taxes to the
public purse. Yet the idea of that old ro-
mantic stratagem haunted him. It seemed
to him as If, were she so to kneel down with
him at that solemn moment, she would be-
long to him more completely than she did
now, would be unable afterward to go back

•.,>J^~'. -L '.I

W^'.i

148

RINALDO.

from Her promise and plight herself to any
other.

He unfolded his daring thought to her,
and was laughed at for his old-world fancies.
But he clung to the idea and returned to it
again and again, whenever they got a few
stolen minutes in the sultry odorous eves
among the yellowing grass and the chirping
crickets.

" If only you would meet me in the city
some Sunday," he said to her again and again.
" It would be easy. You go sometimes to
see your Aunt Zaida. We could go into
some church and kneel down and join hands
at the elevation of the Host. It would be a
sacrament."

" It would be nothing at all," said the girl,
with contempt.

" But I should feel as if you were mine ! "
he urged, " you would feel as if I were yours.
The saints would kno - ; that would be
enough. We cannot jo to mass here to-
gether, but there in the town we might."

" Would you give me a necklace if I did
it ? " said Nita, with a saucy smile ; " a neck-
lace and pins for my hair ? Blue stones or
red J something very goou ?

" I would buy you every stone in the jewel-

RTNALDO.

149

lers' shops ! " he cried, so dazed with rapture
that the greed of the condition never struck
him.

" If it bound lovers together in the old time,
it must bind them so now. To be together
when the Host is raised, and to kneel down
hand in hand when the priest blesses the
F^eople. it is enough to wed us for time and
eternity ! *' he added, with kindling eyes and
an awe-stricken voice.

" Hush ! " said Nita, with a flushed face
and a bashful smile. " Father forbade us, you
know, even to think of each other. To be
sure it would mean nothing, and I could have
Aunt Zaida with me ; but no— it would never
do ; it would be wrong ; we should jest at
the Holy Spirit."

" We should not jest. We should give all
our lives to each other," said Rinaldo, with
passion and earnestness. "It would make
me feel as if you were mine, and you would
not take Tonino's trinkets after laying your
hand in my own before the priest."

The girl smiled, in her own thoughts
thinkmg what silly geese were men. Tonino
was a sturdy wheelwright of Careggi, who
paid his court to her on holy days and feast
days.

wi^

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RTNALDO.

" I see no sense in what you want and a^
deal of danger ; father might come to know,"
she said, stubbornly, "and if I take Tonino's
presents, it is no business of yours ; you give
me nothing yourself, except figs ! "

" You know I have nothing ! " said Rinaldo,
stung to the quick.

" You must have something sometimes, Tor
you pay your rent."

" There is the rent money — yes. We deny
ourselves sorely to put it by "

"But you deny yourself nothing to give me
pleasure ! " ^

" I would cut the heart out of my breast to
give you pleasure ! "

" Pooh ! those are words. Tonino gave
me these."

She shook her pretty head and made some
little silver bells in her ears tinkel a tiny
chime.

" I will choke him dead like a dog ! " swore
Rinaldo. " How dare he ! — the great slouch-
ing black-skinned brute ! "

" He is big and brown as a man should be.
You look like a girl with your pink cheeks
and your yellow hair."

" You do not love me ! You hate me, or
you could not torture me so ! "

RIN-ALDO.

151

" How can I love you ? You are so mean,
so cold, so niggardly ; you are always think-
ing of saving money."

Such scenes were renewed again and again ;
she teased, tormented, caressed, ridiculed,
flouted, tempted, and excited him until he
was mere wax in her hands.

The girl laughed at him, and chided him,
and said such ideas were rusty and romantic
follies ; no one did such things as that nowa-
days. His heart was set on one thing, hers
on another ; the jnd of all her coquetries and
his entreaties \ as that she agreed to do what
he wished on one condition. She would meet
him down in the town, and go into church with
him during high mass, but he was to buy for
her whatever she liked out of the shops on
the jewellers' bridge.

The baseness of the bargain never struck
his mind ; he was too intoxicated with the
certainty that what appeared to him a sacred
and inviolate bond would thus be formed be-
tween them. He knew it would not be a
legal tie as law was ruled in those days, but
it had held good as a marriage in times better
than these, and a true marriage it seemed to
liii Liicii. It oLili vvcjUiu ue.

When she should have knelt down by his

ft,

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<•■■'

■"%

152

RnvArnn.

side in the press of the people, and their
hands should have met, and they should have
bowed down their heads while the Host was
raised, they vould be indissolubly wedded, so
he thought ; no jealous dread of the black-
browed wheelwright would torture him any
more. They would belong to each other,
and nothing would be able to part them.

When she had promised to do this thing,
Rinaldo was stupefied with joy. He scarcely
knew what he did or what he said. Men
joked him, he did not care; his employers
scolded him, l^e did not hear. The long,
hot, light days went on in a blaze of sun and
of delight. He worked very hard, he worked
early and late; but his heart sung in his
breast like a bird in pairing-time.

She could make his hard life sweet for him
as she had made the fruit by the touch of her
lips ; but would she do it } Did her father
know her better than he did ? Would she
give her playtime and amorous fancies to
him, but her solid troth to some other for the
sake of smart clothes and baked meats }

When he went down the hill-side, home,
the evening had waned into night, the round
moon was golden among dark clouds, the
ebon shadows of the fig-tree and of the little

KINAT.no.

153

Stone house fell back across the white and
dusty highways. All around was still, ex-
cept for the chirp of crickets in the dry
grasses, and the soft hoot of the small moth-
hunting owls.

In the moonlight he saw the old woman
sitting on the bench before the door, and the
little brown form of Morianinina cist of^wn
on its stomach beside her in the deep rep(/3e
of slumber.

"Why is not the child abed?" h.. said,
irritably, for the sight of these two who filled
and over-filled his house were unwelcome to
him at that moment.

*' It is hotter in bed than up ; I had not the
heart to force her; you know she always
likes to see you come in before she sleeps,"
answered Nonna Tessa, surprised to see her
boy's face so overcast.

"Am I to suit my hours to meet a baby's
whims ? " said Rinaldo, with increasing irrita-
tion.

"No, dear, no," said his grandmother,
meekly. " 'Tis only the child is fond of you,
and it isn't worth while to flout any love — 'tis
a rare thing in this world."

Thf* child rniiqf»r1 Kir tVjoit- ^rr\\f>o.r> /-v«*-l, ^..^ J

herself up on her hands and knees and shook

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M*4£^'::.i

154

RFNALDO.

her rough hair out of her eyes. " Is 'Naldo

d woman.

? " she said,

1, timidly,
" Won't he carry me in to bed } '"

" Not I, I am not a brat's nurse ! " said the
young man, fiercely, and he strode past the
bench in at the open door.

In the middle of the night, when his gran-
dam and the child both slept, he went to a
corner of the shed where the hens were kept,
and the fagots which were used for firing,
and the tools which had belonged to his
father, and he turned the wood aside and
pulled up a brick and took out a broken pip-
kin. In the little pipkin were some dirty five-
franc bank-notes, a little silver, and a good
number of bronze pence. It was the money
for the rent, fifty francs exactly.

As long as he could remember anything,
the money for the rent, in its slow accumu-
lation, had always been kept out of sight
there in that corner of the shed under the
brambles and dry bracken. As a boy he had
hung on to Tessa's skirts when she had gone
to count it over ; and the mystery and mag-
nitude with which it had been then invested
in his eyes hung stitl about that dark corner
now that for several years it had been his
own earnings which had been buried there,

RINALDO.

s 'Naldo
woman.

said the
past the

lis gran-
ent to a
;re kept,
)r firing,

1 to his
;ide and
ken pip-
irty five-

a good

2 money

nything,
accumu-
3f sight
ider the
' he had
ad gone
id mag-
nvested
: corner ,
een his
d there,

155

right

and his own hands which had had th.
to lift them up and count them.

Looking over his shoulder quickly as
though he were a thief, he turned the
hoarded money 6ut onto the battened earth
of the shed floor. One, two, three, four,
five, six —he began to count it over as he had
done nearly every day before to make sure
that the sum was right. Put all together,
paper, silver, and bronze, there was the
money exact ; fifty francs, scraped together
with hardship and privation and endless toil ;
bound to be paid to the man in the city be-
fore the twenty-fourth of that August. The
season was now July, the tenth of July, and
the weeks which lie before a rent day are al-
ways weeks which scamper with cruellest
haste, and have shorter span in them than
any other weeks of the year.

The money was certainly his to take, but if
he took it or part of it, how could he ever
make it up again by the end of August,
barely seven weeks' time .? He counted it all
out, and laid it before him on the ground,
while the startled hens took their heads from
under their wings and stared with their lit-
tle round eyes at the oil wick, wondering if it
were sunrise.

mi- 1

'_■" -

t't;-.;.;;'

156

RIN-ALDO.

Every piece of the money had, as it were,
a drop of blood, a tear of labor and sorrow.'
on it; to put by this, he had gone without a
pair of boots for feast days, and to set aside
that he had done withou! a draught of wa-
tered wine at noondays ; even every penny
had a physiognomy and a story of its own :
to put together all these stout, dirty, defaced
pieces of metal, how many sacrifices of appe-
tite and longing had he made ! One coin in
especial, a silver coin of ancient date, which
he knew aga^n by a little cross which he had
scratched on it, had a whole day's history in
it for him, for he had gone down into the
town with an empty stomach and had come
back fasting, that he might add it to the store
in the pipkin. How well he remembered the
day, a soft glad day of the last Lent, with
narcissus and lilac everywhere, and all the
town bells ringing ; how his empty body had
yearned, and how his dry throat had gasped
as he passed the wine-shops and the food-
stalls, gripping hard that silver coin, and car-
rying it unspent all the way home, sick with
a day - long hunger, but still so glad and
proud !

" Dear lad ! Good lad ! " Tp<;« \^'.A 0.;^
when he had thrown it down on the table

'■■is:/!

'« ;- J. ii.,;

RINALDO.

it were,

sorrow,
without a
et aside
t of wa-
^ penny
ts own :
defaced
)f appe-

coin in
J, which

he had
story in
nto the
d come
le store
red the
It, with
all the
dy had
gasped
i food-
id car-
:k with
id and

table

157

with a laugh, and set his teeth ravenously
into a dry hunch of bread.

He sat on the mud floor now, with his oil
wick beside him, and spread out all the money
slowly.

It represented for him and his, half a year
of safety, of shelter, of peace. If he spent it,
never again would he be able to gather up
such a sum by the day it would be needed^
Out into the dust or mud of the road
would go the old woman, the young child,
the familiar sticks of furniture, the rough
beds on which they slept the heavy slumber
which follows on toil.

All the respect and self-respect which go
with a home, inviolate and unshared, would
be gone ; there would be nothing for the fut-
ure but the noise and shame of a hired lodg-
ing.

And it was not even wholly and solely his
own. Amid it, part of it, was the money
his grandmother got for the eggs, and by the
bees ; nay, there was even one bright half-
franc which had been given to the cKild by a
stranger for some field flowers, and which she
had brought to them in glf;e and pride, cry-
ing delightedly, '• Morianinma, too, can help
to pay the rent."

S-J;." ••»■„". 4il

Sff'jm JIT -r

%^*-^--' ; ■J

, ^'{V J, ll , . . ]

^*%??{'-f' ■■ 1

ti'v »■.•■■*!• T

- ■«*■<; i' ■

158

RINALDO.

No. It was not his to take. And yet Ri-
naldo with the first blush of shame which had
ever dyed his cheeks red, swept the various
moneys all together into his left palm with a
hurried action, slid his hand into his trousers
pocket, and holding the pocket tightly with
a nervous grip, kicked back the fagots and
branches over the now empty hole, and blow-
mg out his light, went noiselessly out of the
shed and up to the loft where he slept
At break of day he was out of the house
It was a feast day. that of the Purification,
borne bells were ringing for matins, but the
chimes came from the fir-woods above Ma-
J.ano; and no other as yet replied to them.
The air was clear a, glass and cold, with that
delicious coldness of summer dawns in Italy
No one was stirring, the hills were bathed in
cloud, the plain far below was hidden in va-
por. Rmaldo stood and looked at the famil-
iar outlines of the landscape with a strange,
vague fear upon him ; he felt as if he had
committed a crime. The old woman and the
htt^e child were lying asleep. He felt as if he
had cut their throats in their slumber.

"It is my own, it is my own." he kept
saying, with his hand tiehtlv clenrhe^ on fie
money. But he could not persuade himself

RINALDO,

159

that it was truly his, since it had been earned
by mutual toil. It had had a common pur-
pose. It was a common property, theirs as
much as his. He felt as if the little silver
piece which had belonged to the child burned
his fingers as they closed on his pocket where
the coin lay.

" What folly ! " he said angrily to himself.
" It is all mine ; I keep the child and I keep
granny. Any trifle they may make comes to
me by right. It is all mine."

But although he said so, the sophistry did
not satisfy him.

He was by nature essentially honest, and
he knew that, though the law could not have
touched him for it, he had done a dishonest
thing. But though he repented, he did not
atone. The money weighed like lead upon
him, but he did not think once of turning
back to put it again in its hiding place. He
could not bear to think at all. The spectre
of the August day to come, when the rent
should be due, and there would be no money
forthcoming to pay it, pursued him like his
shadow as he ran down the road which he
knew so well that he could have travelled it
DimcixOiCiefa.

There was no reason why he should go so

."t "

ft*"'*" •',

i6o

RTMALDO.

early into the town, but he felt that he could
not meet Nonna Tessa's eyes, nor even bear
to see the little brown face of Morianinini,
lifted to his own. It was still earliest morning,
and the streets were empty, and the hcnses
closed, when he reached the jewellers' bridae,
and sunrise, rosy and radiant, was shedding
its light o ver the rcacheE of the river ; the
littk shops on the truigo were unopened, and
their green wooden shutters covered them
like so many closed Ncah's Ark boxes. He
sat down on, the parapet under the arches,
his hand all the while on the money, his heart
heavy with shame and yet beating wildly like a
cage . I bird's wings with longing and with hope.
He knew the city well, having come thither
often; and yet it seemed strange to him and
hostile ; its silence oppressed him ; it seemed
like a city of the dead ; he had eaten nothing,
but he hid not think of that ; ht thought only
of the coming of Anita.

Slowly the light broadened on the river, and
the blue smoke rose from the chimneys, and
the windows and doors of houses opened, and
mules and horses with their carts came over
the roadway, and itinerant sellers carrying
their warps srrpampd fry ^o. v»i^,,,,^,..: ^.

come down and buy. Ah cixe morning life oi

RINALDO.

i6i

e could
en bear
ianininif
lorning,
houses
bridge,
ledding
er; the
sd, and
i them
s. He
arches,
s heart
^ hke a
1 hope.
th*ither
im and
eemed
)thing,
It only

ir, and
s, and
d, and
5 over
frying
^es to
life oi

the tov n awoke and the many bells pealed
from spire and tower, seeming to call to each
other like friend to friend.

Amid all the noise and stir and confusion
which seemed to him so harsh, after the sweet
melodies of his own bells, Rinaldo sat immov-
able under the arches waiting for the jewel-
lers' and silversmiths' shops to open. At last,
one by one, the dusky shutters were taken
down, and the little queer square dens with all
their treasures close-packed and their back
windows like port-holes showing glimpses of
the water, were opened to the passers-by.
Rinaldo's eyes felt dazzled at all that glitter
and glisten of gold and silver, with the blue of
turquoises, and the pale rose of coral, and the
jewels of reliquaries and chalices shining there
in the full sunshine of the morning within
those little dusky cabins. The shops were to
stand open until noon, and the money was in
his breast pocket. Would she never come ?
Would she fail him after all? His gaze
strained to see her through the crowd. He
sat staring at the southern entrance of the
bridge by which she was sure to come.

*' She cannot doubt that I love her now ? "
he thought, while his pulses beat, and his
ears grew full of the noise around and his con-

Z* •■••■■'

i-VM. . ,.5- ,

t-nfl'--': "J

'' 'Mi- ■

1 62

RIJSTALDO.

science stirred in him fitfully, restless yet slug-
gish, like a drugged watch-dog.

At last he saw her ; the sun shining in her
amber-like eyes, a black veil thrown about
her head, a smile playing upon her rosy
mouth. She looked from right to left ; much
at the jewellers' windows, a little at the loiter-
ing people, not at all at Rinaldo.

" Nita ! " he cried with a shout of joy,
which drew all eyes upon him ; then she saw
him and came up to him quickly.

" You have the money? " she asked

His heart fell.

" Yes," he said, moodily ; " yes, I have
brought it all. But-

" How much is it ? "
" Fifty francs. But-

" It is so little, Aunt Zaida ! " said Nita, with
vexation, turning to the little dirty old woman
who accompanied her.

" It is all I have on earth. • A king could
not give more than his all!" said Rinaldo,
piteously.

She shrugged her shoulders, and turned
from him to gaze at one of the windows.

" You had best make haste to buy, or the
young man's mood may change," whispered
the woman whom she called her aunt.

RIN-ALDO.

163

" I make his moods as I please," said Ani-
ta, pettishly. "Oh, the beautiful, beautiful
things ! Look at these corals, and those big
red stones, and these blue ones, and that
necklace and cross in filigree ! Oh, dear, oh,
dear ! We can get nothing worth getting for
fifty francs. If you had only your pockets
full of gold, 'Naldino!"

" We shall miss the first mass," murmured
Rinaldo, impatiently; his thoughts were far
away from the jewellers' windows.

" Pooh-pooh ! " said Nita, scornfully, "there
is more than one mass in a morning. Let
us go in ; say not a word, 'Naldo, leave Aunt
Zaida ard me to bargain."

Rinaldo followed them in and out of shop
after shop, standing behind them while they
admired and expatiated, wondered and cheap-
ened, handled this and tried on that, taxing
the patience of the sellers severely, and strain-
ing that of Rinaldo almost to bi'— ting. At
last the momentous choice was made ; tired
out with her own hesitations, and broken-
hearted because she could not buy all she
saw, she decided at last on a set of coral, the
thing of the most color which she could find
»-vrs»iv- vTikiiiix in^i priv>,c ^i cuiibisiea 01 ear-

« ' ■-•■^^^.

« 1 -. . .V

^y •:•■

i64

RINALDO.

rings, hair-pins, and a ner.uaie, ail of red coral
in silver-gilt filigree.

" It costs seventy francs the set," she said
to her lover. - Pay for it. Aunt has beaten
them down from a hundred and twr y.'^

" But I have only fifty francs ! " he mut-
tered in sore distress, feeling the seller's eyes
upon him.

" Give your watch in ; they will take it I
think," said iiriita, and she plucked out of his
waistbelt an old silver watch. It had been his
father's, and ir| direst stress and straif of pov-
erty he and Nonna Tessa had never dreamed
of parting with it. They had often gone sup-
perless to bed, but the old watch had always
ticked the night hours by their bed.

" The watch ! Oh, not the watch, Nita ! "
he stammered, piteously. "I can ne er. go
home to granny if I have '- st tVe watc ,."

'' Tell her it was stolen m the streets," said
Anita, and she handed ^he rot.r old silv.-r case
to her aunt while the Jew seller waited widi
the set of corals in his hands.

In a few moments more the watcl va' est-
ed, weighed, priced, and gone. R, , da. had
paid away -Iso the fifty francs, and the set of
coral was in the possession of the Procaccio's
daughter.

■'■W

f^-

RINALDO,

i6s

j%\-

"It is a poor thing compared to all the jew-
els," she thought, discontentedly ; "but at
least it is much finer than Nerino's Maria's
brooch."

The jeweller was meanwhile looking at the
youth who had paid for it, with an amused
and compassionate smile.

Rinaldo was confused and bewilderr \ He
scarcely knew what he said, and the sudden-
OSS of his poor old friend, the watch, stunned
him.

" Let us get to church," he murmured pite-
^usly in Nita s ear. " Santo Spirito is the
nearest church, T think. Come, come, quick,
for heaven's sake '

" Mass is over, saic^ Nita, coolly, " and we
can go to church well jugh at home."

*' But you said "

" Never mind what I said. What I say
now is that I must get home, or father will be
there before me."

" But you promised "

"No woman is bound by a mere promise,"
replied Nita, who was putting on the coral
before a little bit of mirror in the inner den of
the shop.

■'■■ Is coral becoming to fair folks ? " she asked
doubtfully of the old Jew who had sold it

^■^?^\

^'^^^^^^1

;' "s^.-

4f^^^^^^^H

'- *^'^^^^^^^H

-.*»•

i65

RINALDO.

to her. He rubbed his hands and shook his
head with a smile.

"You should have chosen turquoises;
turquoises suit red blondes Hke you, my
dear."

" But we have only such a little money I "
said Anita, with a pouting discontent as she
stuck one of the coral pins in her auburn
braids. Rinaldo, heedless of the dealer's pres-
ence, and of the curious eyes of the people
crowding round the doorway, seized her by
the arm with u*nconscious violence.

"Will you come to the church or not?
Have you brought me here on a fool's er-
rand .? "

Nita laughed, her pretty red lips, as bright
as the coral, curling gayly up at the corners,
and her light eyes glittering with amusement
and anger.

" On a fool's errand ? Eh ! it is only fools
who will trot about on those errands ! High
mass is over by now, and I am in haste to
be home. I will wear your corals— oh, yes,
that I will — at least, until somebody gives me
something better ! "

And she laughed saucily and long, en-
couraged by her aunt's approving titter, and
the jeweller's cunning smile, and the grins ol

RINALDO.

167

-i^"

the faces of the passers-by who had paused
before the door.

The face of Rinaldo grew red as fire, and
then gray and pale under its sunny brown.
The pavement and the river water, and the
jewels and the ornaments, and the blue sky
above them, were all blent in one swirl and
eddy of light before his eyes, and the heat in
his brain scorched him like hot iron.

" You have cheated me ! " he shouted, his
voice shrill as the scream of a wounded horse.
" You have cheated me ! You have got all
I had upon earth and you play me false ! "

The shallow soul of the girl was startled
into a sudden fear, but she was bold and
cruel, and proud of her power. She set her
hands on her hips, and stood in the doorway
of the shop, and laughed impudently in his
face.

" All you had ! A fine story to marry up-
on ! You are a pretty boy, 'Naldino, but
you are a goose. Father is right. Trystings
and kissings are nice sugared cakes, but in
marriage one wants roast kid and silk gowns.
When I do go to church, my lad, it won't be
for a set of coral ! "

Then she drew her veil closer about her
head and nudged her aunt, and nodded to

.[.

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iSiv'-'* IT

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.^.:' .: .,^^H

1 68

RINALDO.

the old Jew salesman^ and was about to el-
bow her way through the little crowd which
was listening to her and egging her on be^
cause she was so pretty, and saucy, and
amused them. But Rinaldo stood between
her and them. He had thrown his hat on
the stones, his eyes blazed like flame, his
teeth chattered with rage, he breathed hardly
and very loud.

" Look at her, ye townsfolk ! " he shouted.
*' A lass of the hills, as simple as a sheep, as
coaxing as a c^t, all wiles and winningness
and softness ! She has taken my all, and she
promised to go before the priest with me;
and now she has got what she wants, she
jeers and flouts me ! Body of Christ ! the
street-walker in your lanes is an honester
soul than she ! She shall never live to grin
and to greet in another man's face and fool
him as she has fooled me. Ah ! cursed red
lips which are like a rose ! "

And he struck her on the mouth violently,
so that she fell backward on the floor of the
jeweller's shop, and leaping on her, he
snatched the coral off her throat, her hair, her
arms, and struck her with it in her eyes, on
her cheeks, on her lips, in furioim rpac^l^cc
blows, which made her face a bruised mass

RINALDO.

169

of bleeding flesh, smashed and shapeless like
' the broken coral toys.

The bystanders shrieked for help, but no
one dared venture within, to touch or stop
him. His passion spent itself in that one mad
and brutal act ; he gave a scornful kick with
his foot to her prostrate body, and spurned
it from his path, then he walked out of the
shop, his head flung back, his nostrils di-
lated, his breast heaving in a tumult of rage
and remorse.

No one dared to put a hand on him. He
had done what it was his right to do, and
the sympathies of the populace were with
him. ** Women change a good youth into a
mad devil full many a time," said a graybeard
among the crowd, as Rinaldo, looking neither
to right nor left, thrust the people aside and
passed on over the bridge.

When the guards came up it was too late ;
he had mingled with the multitude pouring
out from the churches, and was lost to sight
in the dark and tortuous streets of the old
'Oltrarno. They could only lift up the pros-
trate form of the girl and carry it to the near-
est hospital. Her life was in no danger, but
iier ueauty was ruined forever.

All that day Nonna Tessa watched for him

'"I

IJ -'.-S^j

-B

?■■- '". . 'i

tit' *•••*.'

«'!•:;.:

■

f,^.l

I70

RINALDO.

at home. When she had gone to let out her
hens at sunrise, she had seen the disordered
state of the fagots and fern, and" had found
the hole disturbed and the money vanished.

" The lad has taken it to throw away on
the wench," she said to herself.

Rinaldo had gone without a word to her,
and gone down into the town. When the
day had drawn to a close and the sun set,
some gossips came up the hill breathless, and
told her the story as they had heard it.

" They have come for Matteo," they said,
when the tale was done ; " he has gone down
to the town like one mad. It seems your
lad bought a power of goods, and then broke
them on the girl's head ; it is a bad job ; he
is in hiding. Who would ever have thought
it of him, such a docile, good-humored, gentle
youth ! " ^

Nonna Tessa grew rigid as though she
were made of stone, but she went on with
her spinning.

*' The boy is a good boy," she said, sim-
ply ; *' if he have done wrong he hath been
provoked."

More than that the gossips could not ex-
tort from h^r v^nA \vr\\c^t\ tU^xtr ^,,^„«.:-»«_ j i

as to what money he could have had, she an-

RINALDO.

171

. .If*-'' -. '.

swered merely that he had saved some ; that
he would never have taken what was not liis
own.

For the old are more loyal than are the
young.

Night fell, and she hung a lantern in the
open door as a sign that she was awake and
awaiting him. She did not undress or go to
bed, and the child slept on the floor, waking-
fitfully and crying out that people were hurt-
ing 'Naldino.

Long hours passed, sultry hours of a moon-
less summer night ; there was no sound but
from the owls on the wing, and now and then
the scream of a mouse caught by one of them.
The hills lay fold on fold in the dark, one
with another, the air was dry and scented
with the aroma of the pines up above on the
crest of Majaino.

Other persons came up the hill-side bearing
the same tale. Everyone loves to tell bad
news.

The old woman listened in frozen calm. " I
will hear my boy's own story before I be-
lieve," she said, stubbornly, and they could not
get anything else from her, and, tired, the
other women went away to the house of Mat-
teo, where, weeping and chattering and vie-

• nii

^V';

-.Pv

•«JS"

^:^>-^

Mil,-"-

.'■> -• «

~-- J,- » • . XI

172

R2NALD0,

ing with each other in the terrors and horrors
of the versions they gave, all the lodgers and
tenants were screaming and gesticulating to- *
gether. Matteo stayed down in the town.

Nonna Tessa sat on at her door and span ;
but her hands shook and the flax shook in
them. The child, aware that there was some-
thing wrong, but too young to understand
what It was, sat quiet at her feet, playing
sadly with blades of grass and little pebbles
and the beetles which crept among them.

The old woman as the day wore away
hung her soup-pot over a fire of sticks, and
cut some slices from a stale loaf; but she fed
the child, she could not eat herself. Her
tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, her
legs were cold as in winter and dragged
heavily along ; the suspense, the uncertainty
tortured her, but she did not dare to leave
the cottage and go out to try and hear the
truth, for Rinaldo might come here in her
absence.

"If he have done wrong he will come to
me," she thought, and in her innermost soul,
though she would not have admitted it to any
living creature, she had little doubt that the

tale was true, since the money for the

was gone

rent

RINALDO.

173

Twilight fell and no one came near her any
more. All the interest, all the sympathy, of
the dwellers on the hill-side were with the
Procaccio and his daughter. The old woman
folded her trembling hands in her lap and
tried to mutter her Aves, but the familiar
words would not come to her ; she could not
thin^- of them. She could only think of her boy.

" If I and the child had not burdened him,
perhaps this would not have been," she
thought, with self-torturing remorse.

If he should be dead ? If he should have
killed himself in despair and dread of what
he had done ?

She sat on the bench by the wall and
strained her eyes into the gloom. A polecat
stole across the path; the over-ripe figs
dropped with a soft thud upon the grass ; the
great clouds coursed across the sky ; all' was
still— as still as death. Perhaps, had he been
unburdened and alone, he would have led his
life, jocund and free, and been mated where he
had wished. Her long and many years had
been spent in toil, in sacrlfi -e, in pain, in un-
selfish care of others, and v-hat had they
brought to her ? Nothing.

'-' It has all been of no good," she thought,
while her chin dropped on her chest and the

■■;^^'"^';;!

'm^

if'j.. .",. ...J;

174

RINALDO.

fatigue of physical exertion dulled her anxious
mind and lulled it into a momentary stupor
of sleep.

She awoke abruptly, terrified and trembling
from head to foot. " Did you speak, lad.? "
she cried, as she stared into the darkness
around her.

A human shadow came out of the shadows
of the bushes, and ran across the piece of
sward, and knelt down before her.

" I took the money, anci I bought her
corals, and she, had promised to go before the
priest with me, and she cheated me and
flouted me, and I fell on her and no man will
praise her beauty any more ; I have sinned,
I am vile ; I have robbed you and the child.
Oh, granny, granny, curse me and let me die \
I was ready to die ; I had got down in the
bed of the river, I had waded in waist deep,
and the mud and the sand were sucking at
me, drawing me down and down — and then
all in a moment I saw your face, and I heard
your voice, and I felt that I must just see you
once more to say to you, * I am sorry, I am
sorry for you.' "

Then he laid his head on her knees and
burst out sobbing as he had used to sob
when a child, when he had done wrong, had

RINALDO.

175

broken a pitcher, or torn his shirt, or played
truant from school on a summer day. As she
had done then, she did now; she laid her
hands on his bowed head and touched his
sunny curls tenderly.

" You are in a cruel strait, my lad," she
said, gently. "Passion has led you wide
astray. The lass was not worth nor the gift
nor the blow. But it was good of you to
think of me "

Her voice was choked in her throat ; he
did not speak or move ; he knelt there with
his head bowed down on her knees like a
little chidden child. She sat still and mute,
thinking, and her eyes peered through the
darkness to try and see where her old home
lay in the hollow under the olives.

" They will be after you, dear," she said
slowly at last. "You must not stay here.
They will take you like a netted quail. You
must go."

" Go ! And leave you ? It is because I can-
not bear to leave you that I did not kill myself
there in the river."

" You must go," she repeated. " Wait.
Let me think."

She StooH iin anri \\o. onf A^,,,^ '^ *.U _ j .

- _„, ,»,,^i ii^ j^^ \ji\jwi.i ill iiic UUSt

at her feet, like a child ; his back was bowed,

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176

RINALDO.

his head hung down, his whole attitude was
broken-hearted and fall of despair ; he had
eaten nothing since the previous night: all
the day he had skulked and hidden timidly in
the lanes of the town and under the hedges of
the outskirts. Nonna Tessa stood above him
in the dark, her face set and drawn, her eyes
staring.

" You must go," she repeated ; " you must
go."

That was all that was clear to her ; he must
go before the hand of the law could seize him
for what he had done. Suddenly, with hands
strong as in youth, she dragged him up from
the ground and pushed him indoors.

" Break your fast, my child ; you are weak
from hunger and shame," she said, as she
poured out some soup in an earthen pan and
broke bread before him.

" I cannot ; I choke ! " he said, faintly ;
but she persisted, and she fed him spoonful
by spoonful, as she had done when he had
been in his infancy, until, ashamed, he took
the spoon from her and ate.

*' I am a miserable brute ! " he murmured
as the tears rolled down his cheek.

the woman tempted you."

RINALDO.

Then she went into the inner room, and
busied herself putting together in a bundle the
httle linen and the few clothes he possessed,
and she made ready a flask of poor wine
which was kept for feast days, a goat's-milk
cheese and a loaf These she brought out
and laid on the table before him, and counted
down beside them a few silver and bronze
pieces. --

" These I have had saved for years ; I did
not tell you, for I kept them for a worse day
than any we have known. Take them and
make your way into the Mugello ; go to my
brother Claudio, at the saw-mill of Ra^ona
beyond Camaldoli ; it is forty years since he
saw me but he will not have forgotten ; he
will shelter you, and give you work; stay
there till your name is forgotten."

Rinaldo threw his hair out of 'his eyes and
stared at her by the dim light of the lamp.

chid?" ^°"' ^"^ '^"' ^°" "^^ ^"'^ ^^^
"How do the birds live with every man's

hand against them ? Think not of me, but go "
He thrust back the money with a passionate

gesture.

" I have robbed you already. Not again,
not again. *"

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178

RII^ALDO.

She laid her hands on his shoulders, and
looked long into his eyes.

" You did not rob me. You took what was
your own. Besides, you were mad and knew
not what you did. Go, my lad, lose no more
time. Will it be better for mt: and the child if
you stand in the felon's dock ? And Matteo
will have no mercy."

The little girl who was asleep on the floor
awoke, and seeing him there, sprang to her
feet with a cry of joy.

** 'Naldino ! " she murmured, as she clung to
his knees, " I saved some bilberries for you
on a big leaf, and yovi aever came home all
day ! "

Rinaldo lifted her up in his arms and his
tears fell on her little brown head.

** Come with me, both of you," he said, with
a sob. " Then perhaps I shall have courage."

" No, dear, we have been a clog to you all
your days," said Tessa. " Let us do as
we can. Go you, and the Madonna be with
you."

" I will not go alone," said Rinaldo.

He sighed bitterly, and threw his arms up-
ward in a wild, despairing*- gesture.

*• If I go alone I shall kill myself. Oh, how
I loved her ! And I have beaten the beauty

out
hell,
H
thel

not I
In
close
The
at th
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RINALDO.

179

h^Il t \'';i^"1 "^'^^' ""^ ^^>'' ^'^ ^^rth and in
nen, 1 shall only see her face ' "

His grandmother looked at him and took up
the lamp from the table. ^

" ^« ^"' SO together," she said. -. It does
not matter where my bones be laid "
In half an hour they left the little house and

dosed the door and laid the ke; on the step
The old woman paused a moment and gazed
Ht he opposite hills, dim and vague in the
darkness and starlight. She was trying to see
where her old home stood which she had
loved so well. ^°

A southwest wind was blowing, and it
blew to her the smell of its pine-tret, and o
.ts bnar roses. She made the sign of the
cross and blessed the place.

.C "^^r / ^'^- '*" y°" '^^"' ^''"S me back,"
Imt ^' ^^^ •'«'• only hint of lament.

chi.d!^rrsit;^^^^°'"^-"^^''^'''^^«"'«

" '^°^ ^no^s," said Nonna Tessa,
gefher'"''" ''''^' '"^^^'^^^ shall be to-

into the darkness of the hiahe. ».«„ „h„_
nmg the roads which others mightTrrv'et""-
When I am dead, bring me back hither."

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said the old woman once more. And it
seemed to her that she was dead already.

The hearth was cold, the door was shut,
the house was empty. Life was over for her,
as much as though the deal lid of her coffin
had been nailed down upon her.

But her boy wanted her ; she set her face
bravely northward, and looked back no more.

And the three shadows went on together,
along the side of the hill ; and the darkness
covered them, and their place knew them no
more.

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She would not go to bed lest she should
oversleep herself and fail to wake in time.

Every morning of her life she did awake at
cock-crow and arise, but she was afraid this
night that she might lie too long.

*' Will you not come ? " she said to her hus-
band for the hundredth time; and he re-
plied :

" Gui ! Not I. The lad is a good lad, but
not worth a tramp of twenty miles across the
hills, when grain is u.icut and storms are nigh,
as the astrologers do say." And he would
not move off his land ; he was a peaceable,
good soul, hard-working, and penurious and
uncomplaining ; but his blood was slow and
his heart half asleep from over-toil and narrow-
ness of means. He could not see why he
should lose a day's work and take a tramp to
see a boy he had begotten pass by in a cloud
of dust. Those crazes were for the women

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i84

THE HALT.

folk he said, with the good-humored, pitying
smile of his superior manhood.

"Tis silly of you to go, sposa," he said to
his helpmeet ; but she had set her soul on go-

'"ff : 3^ ,r";°°P* ^^''^ encamped fifty miles
otr in the Volterra country, and in their march
mgs and counter-marchings they would pass
through a defile known as the Belva, which
was within her reach, and there would halt at
noonday and eat their noonday meal ; so at
least It was said, and she was bent on win?
thither to see them if they came. For her
boy was among them, her eldest born, her
auburn. haired, blue - eyed, gentle, comely
Daniello. whom she had not seen since he had
gone away with other conscripts, eighteen
months before, from the village in the valley
which was his communal centre. Once or
twice a few scrawled words on a dirty sheet
of paper had come from the post to her, and
she had carried it to the priest, and he had
read it and told out of it that her boy was well
and hoped it found her so likewise. That
was all the news that she had had in a year
and a half of her eldest son, and then her
man wondered that she wished to go over
the hills to see the troops at their halting,
place ! °

THE HALT, 185

" A father's a poor creature," she said, with
scorn.

She and he were very small peasants;
their little farm was meagre and stony. Their
master was a hard man ; their lot was harsh,
but they bore with it cheerfully ; they had
health and strength, and their children were
docile, laborious, and healthy always, al-
though they ate but rye bread with a little
oil and a few beans, and drank nothing but
brook water. The fine, clear mountain air
fed them, as it fed the hill hare and the wild
partridge. Their house was a stone cabin
on the edge of a moor, and a few pines shel-
tered it from the north, and its few fields
sloped southward. All around them was a
war-scarred, desolate-looking, treeless, vol-
canic country, where whole nations lay
buried, and little cities crouched in little
hollows like a child's toys in a giant's
palm.

Their lives were pinched and starved, and
they had much to do to hold their bodies
and souls together in bad years ; but they
were an affectionate people, and cheerful of
nature, and their mother was the most cheer-
ful of all. " If onlv thev wonlrl nol- foU«

away the lads," she said; she would have

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i86

THE HALT.

asked nothing more of the Madonna or the
State than this : only to leave the lads.

A pedlar coming on his rounds had told
them that the troops would pass by quite
near to her on their march, only sixteen miles
off as the falcon flew, and she knew that her
boy's regiment would be with them. " How
will you tell him from the others in all that
pother ? " said her husband ; and she had
laughed. Not know her own son out of five
hundred-— five thousand— five million !

It is impossible for those who can bridge
distance with all the resources of culture and
science to understand the dead darkness, the
utter blank which absence is to the poor and
the ignorant. It is like death : no message
comes from it, no ray of light shines through
its unbroken gloom. The boy had gone ;
they said he would return, but she knew not
when nor why nor how. The State had got
him; something impalpable, immutable, in-
comprehensible ; she knew no more.

When Ruffo, the hawker, passing by on his
bi-annual visit with his pack of needles, and
pins, and tapes, and other necessaries, had
said to her: "The troops are down there;
aye, a fine show : horse, foot, and gunners ;
I saw your 'Neilio in the camp ; he told me

THE HALT,

187

to tell you he and his regiment would go
through the Belva at noonday to-morrow,
and most like halt there. ' Tell mother to
come/ says the lad. ^Lord sakes, lad/
says I, ' 'tis an endless twenty-mile tramp
and more, and your mother is none so young
as she was ; and 'tis reaping time, as you
know well.' But 'Neillo, he only laughs,
and he says, *Tell mother to come.' So I
tell ye. But 'tis not my fault if you go."
Over her dark, lean face a flash of great
eagerness and joy had passed, but she had
gone on with her work, which was stacking
beans.

" I do not tell you to go," said the pedlar.
"Just as like as not they won't march
through the Belva. Those generals always
change their minds at the last minute. But
that was what the lad said to me. ' Tell
mother to come,' says he. ' We g-o throup-h
the Belva.' " ^ 6

" How looks he ? " she asked.

" Aye, aye ; a bit thin, but well ; I am not
saying he does not look well."

She shot a quick glance at him from be-
neath her gray brows.

"He was never over-strong," she said,
under her breath. " When children have

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i88

THE HALT,

never enough in their belh'es they cannot
grow up strong men."

" Lads would be always pecking if one let
them," he rejoined. "He did not complain
to me; not a word."

" 'Neillo was never one to complain," said
the woman.

And she would not lie down lest she
should by any chance oversleep herself, but
kept walking to and fro, plaiting her strands
of straw while the children and the ^ood-
man slept.

There is but little night in the middle of
the month of July, and when the moon is at
the full there seems no night at all, but only
a more ethereal and more luminous day.

At four o'clock she lifted the latch of the
house-door and went out, leaving the bread
and the weak cold coffee ready for them to
break their fast. The eldest girl would heat
up the coffee in its rude tin pot, and they
would have a sup or two each to moisten
their dry rye-crusts.

It was day already; the broken barren
hills which stretched around her home were
touched with soft roselight ; a deep sense of
coolness and of rest lay like a benediction on
the noiseless scene; the stone slopes, so

THE HALT.

189

harsh and cheerless at other hours, were in
this hour softened and spiritualized into
beauty ; clouds floated in their hollows, and
white mists like inland seas stretched between
the high hill-tops.

She was a tall, gaunt woman, only thirty-
eight years old by age, but twice that age in
appearance. Her hair was gray and thick,
her skin brown and deeply lined ; her profile
had the straight classic lines. She had been
handsome in her youth, but that was all of
beauty that remained to her ; her bosom was
wrinkled and fallen, her teeth were few and
rotten, her cheeks were hollow. Scorching
summers, freezing winters, the soaking
storms of spring, and the mountain winds of
autumn, had all played with her as with a
loosened leaf, and b . :eted her about and
beat her out of womanhood. She toiled hard
all through the year, hoeing, weeding, cutting
grass, carrying wood and water, ploughing
behind the little heifer up and down the steep
and stony fields. The silence and the soli-
tude around were so familiar to her that they
had no terrors ; she had lived all her life
among these stony hills, this alternation of
bare slate and granite with friable tufa and
petrified lava mounds. She knew that to the

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I90

THE //ALT.

west lay the sea. and to the east were the
fertile and radiant Tuscan plains; but with
her own eyes she had never seen aught ex-
cept her native hills, never known aught ex-
cept the scanty nourishment for man and
beast which they grudgingly yield, and the
perpetual isolation to which those who dwell
amidst them are condemned.

She had a piece of bread in her pocket
and she knew that there were water-springs
here and there in the rocks ; she had her
sickle swinging at her side ; she meant to cut
grass if she found any, and bring it in a bun-
dle on her shoulders on her return journey
home. She was in the habit of never losing
a moment nor neglecting a chance. She had
put on her one better gown, a brown woollen
skirt with a yellow bodice, and over it she
had a great coarse cotton apron of a faded
blue. She had nothing on her head, and her
sleeves were rolled up to the elbow ; she car-
ried her shoes in her hand, not wishing to
spoil them by so much walking, but meaning
to wear them when she should enter the Bel-
va gorge so as to do honor to her boy. She
bought a pair once in ten years; strong
leather things, with wooden soles, which
were only worn on rare occasions. She had

THE HALT.

191

put also in her capacious pocket a little round
cheese and a loaf of wheaten bread to give
her son. She would willingly have brought
wine also, but wine was never seen on those
hill-tops, except in the priest's chalice at the
little church where the stone-pines stood in a
hollow of the rocks.

She walked on at the level pace of one
used to cover ground quickly and evenly.
The air was cool, the breeze blew from the
sea ; the lovely lights of sunrise chased the
shadows of the dawn. Her mind was busy
with her boy, travelling over all his short,
uneventful life. She thought of him as he
had lain at her breast a little conical bundle
of swaddling-clothes, with only his small
brown hands and his eager, red, wet mouth
free. She thought of him at ten months old,
escaping from her arms to totter across the
stones before the door for the first time alone
upon his feet. She remembered one day
when he had fallen from a plum-tree and
twisted his ankle, and lay in her lap sobbing
and rubbing his curly head against her arm.
Then there was the day he took his first com-
munion, such a slim, bright-eyed, well-built
little man, though small and thin ; for there
was scanty food to divide among so many,

. .1

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192

THE HALT,

and the children were always hungry. She
had cut up her only good cotton gown to
make him a shirt and breeches for that day ;
it had been a day in midsummer ; the sun had
shone on his auburn head as he went up over
the rugged pavement of the church, so dark
even at noon, except where the strong hot
rays shot through the clefts of the narrow
windows. He had been a good lad always,
docile and active and chaste, kind to the little
ones, obedient 'to his parents, and content
with his lot. Then the State had caught him
up out of her hand, and she had ceased to
know anything of him; a high blank wall
had been built up between her and him ; he
had been taken far away, and she had had
nothing left to do except to kneel down on
the benches before the little picture, of the
Madonna and pray for him. Twenty-one
years he had been hers, paid for by her pain,
her labor, her privation, her sacrifice; and
then all in a moment he had become nothing
to her, he had been taken by the hand of the
State. She had never understood it nor for-
given it. They might say what they would, it
was cruel, it was wicked, it was accursed. He

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the blankness of darkness between him and her.

THE HALT.

193

But at last, perhaps, she would see him.
He had bidden the pedlar ask her to come.
He had not forgotten. If it were only to see
him go by in the scorch and sweat of the
march, it was enough to live for, enough to
walk to the end of the world for ; and should
there be a halt, a bivouac, as they said, she
would clasp him in her armr and hear his
voice, and see him eat of her oread and licr
cheese, and wipe the dust off his face as if he
were a child once more. " Tell mother to
come to the Belva," so he had said. Dear lad,
dear lad ! He had not forgotten her, nor the
way the country lay among the rocks about
his home.

The light widened and brightened and be-
came full day.

The air grew warm. The landscape, losing
the rosy lights and silvery shadows of the ear-
liest hours, became bare, bald, and sad, scored
by heaps of shale thrown out where, ever since
Etruscan days, men had delved for copper and
disfigured the face of nature ; the mines have
been long unused, but the scars made by them
remain. The path she followed was always
the same, a scarce visible mark, passing over

i.1 ..^it, ^vaiu giaoo vviiiCii grew on tne slate

and gneiss of the rocks and the calcareous soil.

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194

THE HALT.

Now and then there came in sight a flock of
goats, a group of pine-trees, a church tower,
or a disused posting-house ; but these were
far apart, and the whole country was cheer-
less, tedious, abandoned.

Her way lay southward, and westward, by
no regular road, but by tracks, scarcely seen,
which were made and followed by the strings
of mules carrying charcoal or lime which had
passed over those mountain-tops century after
century since the days of Latin and Etruscan
and Gaul.

She went many miles without meeting a
soul. The habitations were very few, and
the path she traversed was still only a mule-
track scarcely traceable. When she at last
did meet a human being, an old man on an ass
with sacks before and behind him, she stopped
and exchanged a few words for sake of saying
that of which she was so proud : " I am go-
ing to meet my son. He is passing through
the Bcjlva with his regiment. He sent for
me."

And the old man said :

" Oh, oh ! That is fine pleasure for you.
I was a soldier myself long ago — long ago.
Good-day to you, good wife, and joy be with
you."

THE HALT.

195

Then the little tinkling sound of his ass's
hoofs on the rocky ground died away in the
distance, and she was once more alone in the
midst of the dry, sear, stony hills, where only
the horned toad and the squat tarantula had
their lodgings.

It grew very hot, and the rocks seemed like
heated copper as her bare feet smote them
Gnats buzzed and snakes basked in the heat
There was little or no vegetation, only here
and there a starved pine or a stunted lentiscus.
She was fatigued by the hard ground and the
heat of the sun, but the farther she went the
lighter grew her heart. " Soon," she said to
herself, -soon I shall see my boy face to
face ! "

The burning daylight poured down on her.
There was no shade on these rocks, nor on
the level friable soil which divided them
Mosquitoes were in clouds, and larger gnats
m great numbers. But although footsore
and weary, she was glad of heart. Yes, she
said to herself, the old man was right ; it was
a fine pleasure for a woman to see her lad
safe and sound.

When she came to a spot where a little
spring issued from the rocks and flowed into
a hollow, green with moss of its own creating,

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THE HALT.

she drank from it and rested a short time, eat-
ing a crust.

When she passed a house, which was very
seldom, and paused by its doorway to speak
with the inmates, she said to them, with a
^low of pride :

" My son's regiment marches through the
Belva to-day ; he sent for me to go and see
them pass ; perhaps they will halt there."

To have a son marching with his regiment
seemed to her almost greater than to be a
crowned queen, and more cruel than the
saints' martyrdom.

In the distance, still very far off, she could
see some dark lines and spots ; she knew
that they were the woods crowning the gorge
of the Belva, the only trees in all that country-
side. She quickened her pace as she saw
them. The sun was high. Dear heaven ! if,
after all, the troops should pass through the
gorge without halting there !

The pedlar had said that it was possible.

Her legs seemed to bend and quake under-
neath her at the thought. But she was a
strong, tenacious woman, and she conquered
her terror and continued on her way. It was
two hours and more before she reached the
outskirts of the woods and saw a little cluster

THE HALT.

ime, eat-

vas very
to speak
, with a

ugh the
and see
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egiment
to be a
lian the

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e knew
e gorge
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ugh the

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nquered
It was
led the
I cluster

197

of huts, flocks of goats, breadths of rough
grassland, low undergrowth of chestnut and
oak, tall groups of pine maritime and stone.
The gorge of the Belva lay beneath.

It was now a breathless noontide. She
began to descend under the welcome shade
of the pines. The wild strawberry plants
were in flower and gentians were growing'
thick ; she looked at them curiously ; there
were no flowers, where she lived.

A goat-herd lay half-asleep upon the moss,
and awoke at her step.

" Have the regiments come into the
gorge ? " she asked him, her heart beating
thickly against her ribs.

The man answered lazily, but half-awake :
"Aye: I heard their bugles awhile ago.
They halt there."

" My son is among them," she said with
pride, and hurried past him and his flock.

It was such a great thing to have a son a
soldier. Half an hour's descent through the
oak and chestnut scrub brought her where
she could see down into the gorge itself.

Yes, they were there; she could distin^
guish the white linen caps, the horses, the

cannon

see inasses moving to and
fro, the sparkle of metal, the dull yellow-white

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198

THE HALT.

Of canvas. Yes. they were there. She
crossed herself and thanked God, kneeling
for a moment on the carpet of fir-needles,
. then rismg and hurrying downward.

The descent was long and winding, and
the trees hid the bottom of the ravine from
her view ; but when she reached it the regi-
ments were still there, resting and breaking
their fast. She went up to the first group
of young soldiers whom she saw and said to
them, "I am his mother-'Neillo's mother,
^ill you take me to him, please ? He sent
for me.

Her voice shook hoarsely with emotion ;
her fingers plucked at her apron. Before that
unknown, confused, motley mass of men she
trembled ; how should she ever find her boy ?
Her strength began to fail her. She went
from man to man. The youths grinned in
her face and turned their backs on her
rhey laughed, they joked, they teased, they
bandied her about from one to another ; she
made the round of the camp, stumbling over
tlie haversacks lying on the ground, staring
stupidly at the strange scene.

There were big field-pieces unlimbered, ar-
tillery horses unharnessed and tethered rook-
ing- hres and eating- vessels, loosened knap-

THE HALT.

199

sacks and dusty jackets ; the men were for
the most part in their shirt-sleeves, they were
talking and shouting mirthfully, discipline be-
ing for the hour relaxed.

It was a busy, tumultuous, noisy kind of
repose ; and the cries and the din and the
movement as she approached made her head
spin and her ears sing. There seemed such
numbers, such endless numbers, and they ?]1
looked alike with their cropped heads, their
swathed legs, their puny stature. How was
she to find her lad among that restless multi-
tude .?

But she was not daunted.

A soldier at last, more patient than the
rest, or more pitiful, explained to her that
this was the artillery, three field batteries,
with a cavalry regiment ; that her lad, whom
he knew by name, was with the infantry in
the rear column, which had halted a mile fur-
ther down the glen. She thanked him and
commended him c. the Virgin's care, and
went onward; though her limbs were so stiff
and their veins were so swollen that she
walked with difficulty.

But she was full of joy and anticipation, be-
cause sne had now heard for certain that her
boy was there.

20O

THE HALT,

She spoke merrily to the men whom she
passed ; light of heart, and insensible to the
pain of her swollen veins and the smart of
her tired feet. 'Neillo was there ; that was
enough.

" I have got a loaf and a cheese from home
for my boy," she said, to a patrol who showed
some suspicion of her bulging pocket; and
the patrol laughed, and she laughed too, and
they let her pass.

Shrinking from interrogation and observa-
tion, yet always persevering, she pursued her
quest, saying always, " I am 'Neillo's mother
He wished me to come. I have walked all
the way. Where is he, please } "

The line regiments were some way off
down the gorge, under the shade of some
overhanging rocks. Their short, white-
clothed figures were moving to and fro
crowding over camp-ketdes, bringing water
from a spring which a little way off trickled
from the rocks ; but there was not so much
gayety and chatter and activity as there had
been among the gunners and the troopers
The officers were standing together under a
solitary pine-tree, and their voices sounded
low and grave, and they looked troubled,
ohe came among them all timidly, yet with a

THE HALT.

201

bright expectation on her weary, hot face.
She looked from one to another longingly
hopelessly, anxiously, but she could not see
her 'Neillo.

At last she came to a group of young men
who were very quiet and stood about, aim-
lessly, lookmg down on something on the
ground. What they looked at were three
Jads like themselves lying on their backs in
the shade under a large chestnut-tree. She
came near to them timidly, with a va^ue
nameless fear chilling her heart. '

" What is the matter with them } " she
asked. " Are th'-y ill ? *'

^ The conscripts standing around answered
m low lones :

"No, wife; they are dead. They fell
down dead on the march. 'Twas thirty
miles, and so hot."

Then she drew nearer and nearer, and bent
down over the prostrate figures, and drew the
hnen covering off each of their faces in turn •
and thus at last she saw her son once more '

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The stable had once been a church. Not
very long ago, indeed, it had still been a
church, though service had not been said in
it fo»- more than a hundred years. When it
had been utilized as a livery-stable there had
been no trouble taken to change its propor-
tions. The pointed arches, the tall columns
of dark granite, the narrow aisles, the leaden
casements in the deep-set windows, had all
been left unaltered. Wooden partitions had
been set up between the pillars to make stalls
for the horses, and straw had been thrown
down on the obliterated mosaics of the pave-
ment ; that was all. It was situated in a nar-
row, old, dark street, with old houses with
deep eaves, great sunken doorways, and
curious stone corbels and cornices around it
on every side. The street had once been
full of martial movement and prrlPQi'nctiV^l
splendor, and had a great monastery in it

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206

THE STABLE-BOY.

which had been burned down during the
siege by the Imperialists ; its church had es-
caped the flames, but had sunk to a sadder
fate. It was a livery-stable, and the clang of
pails, the stamp of hoofs, and the oaths of
grooms were the only sounds heard where
once the organ had pealed and the intoning
resounded, and the anthems of Palestrina and
Corelli echoed. It was left to dirt, to gloom,
to decay ; the cobwebs hung thick as velvet
in all the corners, the glass was opaque with
long-accumulated dust; the pavement, with
its marbles and mosaics, was slippery with
dung and urine ; here and there was a niche
with an unmutilated statue, here and there
was a fresco still traceable, a carving still
visible ; but although its lines were un-
changed and its serried columns unbroken, it
was a wreck of itself.

There are many of these old desecrated
churches in Italy ; some are workshops, some
are warehouses, some are granaries, some,
as this was, stables. And there is no sadder
sight in the world: their quietude, their
beauty, and their dignity protest in vain
against their desecration. They are all old
churches, built by true artists of the early
centuries, "masters of the living stone;"

THE STABLE-BOY.

207

churches which men painted, and decorated,
and covered with emblem and symbol before
which the rude knight and the rough free
companion bared their heads and bent their
knees. But neither their age nor their his-
tory spares them, there are so many of them
in the streets, and the worshippers have
grown so few.

In this stable there were several horses
and several vehicles, and coachmen and
helpers went to and fro in it, and the ancient
purpose and usage of it troubled none of
them. The only one who ever thought of it
was a little stable-boy, the butt and slave of
everyone, who lived there night and day,
having nowhere else to Hve, and who loved
it in his dull way, as some canon or some
abbot may have loved it in his finer way, dur-
ing the days of its glory. Gino was the boy's
name ; he was fourteen years old ; he had
neither father nor mother, nor any relatives
that he knew of, and it was a great thing for
him to be a stable helper, with a franc a day
and leave to sleep among the straw in the
sacristy, which had been turned into a forage
chamber. He was hardly treated and worked

nOrn ■Tr*** fl^^a AlAtrr^wr-^ ryr^A r,^^\A • 11

and rough, and put all they could upon him.

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208

THE STABLE-BOY.

But he was strong and willing, and did not
complain. He was fond of the horses, and
lived willingly among them, seldom leaving
the dusky old street in which the stables were
situated. In appearance he was small for his
age, but robust. He had a round brown face
with black eyes which had a great, uncon-
scious pathos in them ; he was never seen
without his coarse apron and his stable cap.
There were no feast-days or holy-days for
him ; all days were alike ; the watering, the
foddering, the harness-cleaning, the oats-sift-
ing, the stall-cleaning, never varied. It was
the same work every week, every month,
every year. He did not complain. He even
liked his work. He had been taken into the
stables out of charity at eight years old, and
they were all of home he knew. Besides,
in them he had Stellina.

Stellina was his supreme comfort and com-
panion, his one friend. She was a little black
lupetto dog, with four white feet, and a small
white point upon her chest, which had gained
her the name of "little star." She had come
a stray puppy to the stables four years before,
and Gino had hidden her in the straw and
fed her, and at last ventured to ask for, and
by good fortune obtained, permission to keep

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T//E STABLE-BOY,

209

her openly there. She was very quick and
courageous in chasing rats, and this prowess
found her favor in the eyes of the stablemen.
Stellina, like Gino, never stirred out of the
street. To her were all unknown the joys of
meadow and garden, the scamper among the
grass, the frolicking among the buttercups,
the splashing in rain-water pools or river shal-
lows, which are so dear to happier and freer
dogs.

Their one world was the old church ; its
darksome aisles, its musty sacristy, and the
sharp, uneven cobble-stones paving the space
in front of it. To Stellina as to her master it
seemed a kingdom. They knew of nothing
beyond, and what they had never known they
did not miss, although instinct sometimes
moved restlessly in both the boy and the dog
in a vague, dim want of more space, more
movement, more freedom. Yet they were
both content with the busy, harmless, inno-
cent lives under the old groined arches and
the broken wings of the stone angels.

Stellina believed that the horses depended
alone on her for defence and vigilance. With
her erect furry ears sharply ^cocked she
watched their coming and going, their groom-
ing and feeding ; barked when they neighed,

"5- .-In,

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' St.'

1st: uli

210

THE STABLE-BOY.

and growled when they snorted. That the
horses, and the men too, could not have ex-
isted an hour without her protection and sur-
veillance, Stellina was quite sure. When all
the horses and men were away, which often
happened, she and Gino conversed with one
another, sitting side by side in the straw,
caressing one another, but always keeping a
weather eye open for any rat or mouse which
might stir beneath the litter.

From time to time Stellina had puppies,
and then she was prouder, happier, more
vigilant than ever, with a snug nest made
under one of the horses' mangers in a bale of
hay. She was such a pretty, dog, and so
valiant against rodents, that her children
easily found homes in the neighborhood ; but
she was a fond mother and mourned for them
long when they left her, and rejected all the
consolations of her owner.

** Poor dear Stellina ! " said Gino to her
one day, when she mourned thus, ** the next
you have shall stay with you, or one of them
at least ; the master will not mind ; he knows
how good you are."

So when her next puppies were born he
renewed his promise that one at least of them
should never be taken from her ; they were

THE STABLE-BOY.

211

liat the
ave ex-
nd sur-
hen all
h often
ith one
straw,
jping a
i which

uppies,
', more
made
bale of
and so
hildren
id ; but
>r them
all the

to her

le next

)f them

knows

orn he
)f them
^ were

thr'^e little white things and one black;
their father was a white lupetto, who lived at
a shop near, where they sold old iron and
brass and copper utensils.

Gino was as happy in the possession of
these treasures as Stellina was ; out of his
pence he bought her milk and tripe and
wheat-bread, as much as he could eat. He
had few idle moments, but those he had he
passed squatted under the manger, looking at
and talking to the mother and babes. He de-
nied himself food, and drank nothing except
the bad water of the stable well, that he might
get them all they wanted. The men were
good-natured, and did not tease him about
his hobby, and the horse near whose hoofs
Stellina had made her bed sniffed at them
amiably, and took infinite care not to touch
them with his iron shoe. Three of the pup-
pies were already promised ; and the fourth,
the black one, he hoped to be able, somehow
or other, to keep with its mother.

One day, wlien the puppies were two weeks
old, he was alone in the stables. It was very
warm weather, full midsummer. The horses
and men were all out, only one old mare was
dozing in her stall ; the doors stood open to
catch such evening cool as there might come

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212

THE STABLE-BOY.

into the air ; the heavy curtains of dust and
cobwebs hung before the casements sunk
high in the masonry. Gino had been clean-
ing, brushing, splashing, sweeping ; he was
gray with dust and wet with heat ; but he
was well and happy, leaning against the lin-
tel and looking into the street ; tired in every
limb, but satisfied with himself and his little
world, and above all with Stellina, whom he
had brushed and combed until she shone like
a piece of black velvet. She never left her
children for ten minutes ; but they were sound
asleep in the hay, and she had stolen out to
her owner's side for a second, licking his hand
and then sitting down on her litde haunches
just outside the door, looking up and down
the street which was so familiar to her.

Gino, with a strarw in his mouth and his
shirt-sleeves rolled up, was half-asleep and
half-dreaming, his eyelids closed and his lips
parted ; he had a smile on his face.

"Good Stellina! dear little Stellina!" he
said, sleepily, and then for an instant his fa-
tigue overcame him and he lost consciousness,
still leaning against the massive column of the
door ; he was not asleep two minutes, but his
dream seem.ed lone.

As a little child he had been in the country

THE STABLE-BOY.

213

lust and
ts sunk
;n clean-
he was
but he
the Hn-
in every
bis little
^hom he
lone like
left her
'e sound
1 out to
lis hand
aunches
d down

•

and his

:ep and

his lips

la!" he
: his fa-
)usness,
n of the
but his

country

always, and in his sleep he revisited the green
fields of his birth whenever he did dream at
all. He thought he was running with the dog
through the growing corn, under the maple
and the vine boughs ; there were tall red tu-
lips in the corn, and a litde runlet of water
flowing under grass and watercress, and there
were church bells ringing and birds singing,
and it was all so green, so cool, so fresh.
Stellina ran in the brook and splashed the
drops in his face, and he took off his shoes
and ran, too, in the brook, and it w^as so de-
licious and cold bubbling- about his achino-
dusty feet.

He awoke with a start, and with a shrill
shriek ringing in his ears.

In the yellow light of evening he saw Stel-
lina's little body swinging in the air ; a noose
of cord was round her throat, and by it she
was b^ing drawn into space, the noose tight-
ening as she was raised higher and higher, and
the pressure on her gullet forcing her eyes
from her head and her tongue from her jaws.
She had given one scream as she was seized,
then the rope had choked her into silence.

In an instant Gino knew what it was : the
dog-snatchers had got her; the fatal cart,
with its escort of guards and its brutal lasso-

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214

THE STABLE-BOY.

throwers, had come suddenly down the lane
and had seized her as she sat before the sta-
ble gates. With a jerk she was flung into the
cart and the lid shut down, the men laughino-
as they crammed her in and banged the lid
Scarcely awake, dull from fatigue and heat,
and still dazed with his dream, Gino stag-
gered forward and caught hold of the cart.

Stop I stop ! " he cried to them. " Take
her out! give her back! She has puppies
in here. They will die; she will die. Let
her out ! let her out ! "

But the guards pushed and dragged him
off the cart to which he clung, and the do^-
lifters swore at him, and one man, rougher
than the rest, struck him in the chest and
knocked him backward against the stable
door ; the cries of the dogs within the cart
and of the street children running along with
It addmg to the confusion and the din. The
boy was thrown down so that his head struck
the stone gatepost ; the cart with its myrmi-
dons rolled on its way. He staggered to his
feet, holloaing loudly: "She will die! they
will die ! Let her out ! let her out ! "

He began to run on after the cart, which
was turning round a corner, but an old
woman of the quarter caught him by the arm.

((

THE STABLE-BOY.

215

the lane
the sta-
into the
lughing
the lid.
d heat,
> stag-
cart.
" Take
Juppies
;. Let

id him
e dog-
3ugher
St and
stable
e cart
§f with

The
struck
lyrmi-
to his

they

ivhich
n old
: arm.

*' 'Tis no use, child," she said to him, "they
will not give her. They have no bowels of
mercy, those brutes. Quiet yourself and let
them alone, or they will haul you off to
prison, and then where will your little dog
be?"

" But the puppies will die ! She will die ! "
he screamed. " They are too little to be left,
and her milk will burst and kill her ! "

And he tore himself from th(

hold

woman

and ran headlong after the cart, leaving the
stables open and unwatched. He knew
(what Florentine boy does not?) that the
men would no more give her up than they
would pity her or him ; they were too hard-
ened to their brutal work ; but, hoping
against hope, he ran on and on, blindly
stumbling in his haste until he overtook the
procession. The shrieks of the imprisoned
dogs could be heard above the noise of the
street.

" Give her to me ! give her to me ! She
has puppies at home, and they will perish ! "
he cried again, keeping up step by step with
the men. The tears rolled down his face ;
he was sick and gasping; he could hear
Stellina's cries.

The guard who had thrown him down

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2l6

THE STABLE-BOY.

urned on him savagely. " Get you gone, or
1 will take you to the Questura for obstruct-
ino- the law ! " he said, with an oath.

" You will only do her more harm than
good," said a man in the crowd to the sob-
bing boy._ "Go home and look up your
money, and in the morning buy her out it
you can."

" In the morning ! She has never been
out of the stables an hour, and how will her
little ones bear the night starvincr ? "

He sobbed aloud, wringing his h<?.nds.

The little crowd which moved ajong with
them murmurea and took his part. " Give
him the bitch if she is in milk," said a
woman's voice. But the creatures of the
law were only angered by the expostulation ;
they did not net their victims only to lose
them, and lose with each the blood-money
paid for them. Obdurate and unfeeling, and
swollen with the accursed official tyranny
they went on their way, the dog stranglers
foremost, the cart second, the guards last.

" You will not get her to-night were it
ever so," said some men to him. " It is
eight of the clock. Was she never caught
before } Nay, nay, do not look so, lad. A '
dog 13 a dog, and there are scores of them."

THE STABLE-BOY.

217

Then the little throng- dispersed and went
divers ways, and left him alone, its interest
in him gone.

Mechanically, by sheer habit, he returned
to the stable, frightened at his neglect of
duty, and bewildered by his grief. The lit-
tle pups were bleating like new-born lambs,
plaintively, in the straw. "The pups, the
pups ! " he said, over and over again, choking
down his sobs. They must die without their
mother ; they could not lap or take any kind
of food. He took them up one after another
avid tried to make them suck a wisp of hay
or an old rag soaked in milk ; but the little
bhnd things could not understand; they only
whimpered. He put them back, and covered
them up, and, with the tears running down
his cheeks, took his pitchfork and began to
renew the fodder for the night, and clear the
dung away out of the stalls.

It had always been a terror upon him lest
the lasso should seize Stellina ; but she had
been so home-staying and so prudent that
the danger had never been realized by him to
Its full extent. Like a true Tuscan, he had
always been sure that chance would favor
him.

But this day the dog-snatchers had not even

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2 1.8

THE STARLE'IiOY.

been commonly fair in their brutality. They
had seized her on her own ground, on the
very threshold of her home.

How she must suffer, cooped up in that nar-
row hole, without light or air, choked with a
stifling collar and flung into a horrid den, if she
had reached the slaughter-house, whither all
captured dogs are carried ; breaking her heart
in the agonies of her maternal love and of her
physical sufferings !

Gino worked on, not seeing the straw, and
the dung for his tears. The people had told
him to get his money together to buy back
Stellina ; but he had no money ; he never had
any money ; the scanty wage which he re-
ceived was always forestalled for payments of
his food and hers, and for such poor clothing
as he was forced to wear. He had never
known in his life what it was to have a franc
to spare or to put by for future use. Get his
money together ! They might as well have
said to the poor misused ass in the scavenger's
cart, " Get yourself gilded oats and jeweWed
harness ! " He had nothing.

When the men came in he told them of his
grief, and begged their help ; but they were
improvident and extravagant fellows, in debt
themselves up to their necks, and fond of

Tllli STABLE-BOY.

219

They
on the

hat nar-
i with a
:n, if she
ither all
er heart
J of her

■aw. and
lad told
ly back
ver had
he re-
lents of
:lothing
i never
a franc
Get his
;11 have
enger's
eweWed

n of his
y were
in debt
bnd of

drink. One laughed at him ; one pitied him,
but, turning out his pockets, found only a half-
penny ; a third told him with an oath not to
talk rot, but harness quickly ; and a fourth,
meaning to be good-natured, said, " Let her
go, lad, and drown the whelps ; you can get
another bitch fast enough."

That was all the memory they had of Stel-
lina, who had jumped on them and frisked
round them and made much of them, and
killed rats for them five whole years.

No one slept in the stables except Gino,
who, being a homeless boy, had always
thought it a great blessing to have a bed of
sacking spread on the straw or on the top of
one of the corn-bins, as he chose. He had
usually but little time to sleep, as the horses
and vehicles came in late and the morning
work began at daybreak or before it. This
night he did not even try to sleep, but could
not have slept had he tried, for the piteous,
plaintive piping of the baby dogs crying for
their mother. They whined and wailed un-
ceasingly, seeking their natural food and their
natural warmth, and finding neither. He could
do nothing to comfort them. He hugged them
to his heart in vain. Hunger was torturing
them, and they were too young to know any-

.„■?».

'It.

y.-m

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220

THE STABLE-BOY.

thing except the first embryonic, semi-con-
scious pain. The boy was distracted by their
ceaseless cries, which answered his own pas-
sionate grief for their absent mother. He felt
them growing more and more weak, less and
less warm, and he knew that if they could not
eat they must die.

The deep tones of the Santo Spirito clock
striking four of the morning told him that day
was here, though no light came as yet into the
dusky aisles of the desecrated church. The
horses were already stamping in their stalls
and striking with their forehoofs against the
woodwork of their boxes ; he shivered with
cold, as the little puppies did, in the hot musty
air reeking with ammonia of the stables, and
laid the poor little things each in their nest
under the manger and began to do his morn-
ing work. But he did his work ill.

When the men came in they swore at him,
and hustled him, and one gave him a kick on
his shin. "You lumbering dolt!" said this
one, "go and choke with your bitch. You are
no use here."

They had no pity on him.

There was a wedding in the town, for which
all the horses and carriao-es were eno-ao-ed and
they were all in a hurry, grooming, washing,

THE STABLE-BOY.

221

and polishing with extra speed and care. Gino
tried to do well, but he scarcely knew what he
was about, and his head buzzed and span ; he
was thinking of Stellina in her captivity and
pain. The puppies whimpered and whined.
**Drat those little beasts," said the men ;
" pitch them in a pail of water."

The livery-stable keeper came in to see if
the horses were being made smart for the
bridal festivities ; he heard the noise of the
puppies and turned round impatiently to the
spot whence it came.

" Take out those whelps," he said to the
stable boy. " You make the place a kennel."

" Oh, sir ! " said the lad, with a sob, " they
were so happy, but the dog-cart took their
mother last night, and they are dying of hun-
ger."

• " They lassoed your black lupetta ? "
"Yes, sir; yesterday, at eight o'clock in
the eveninof."

" Well, it cannot be helped. Drown the
pups ; you can't rear them. Here, you, For-
tunio," said his master, to an ostler, •* if the
boy is too soft-liearted to do it, chuck them
in a pail and have done with them."

^ Then lie turned on his heel, whistling an
air from the Cavalleria Rusiicana,

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£:>«<■

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222

THE STABLE-BOY.

The ostler Fortunio, nothing loth, went to
the stall where the little animals were, and
thrust his hand into the hay under the man-
ger to drag them out of their nest ; they were
whimpering piteously. But Gino sprang be-
fore him, and caught hold of them, and
hugged them to his breast.

" No one shall touch them," he said, fierce-
ly. '* Let them be, let them be. Give me
leave to go out, sir, and I will take them to
the Macelli and ask them to let me put them
with their mother. They surely will. Oh,
they surely will ! "

"They surely will not, you fool," said his
master, half touched, half irritated. " But
you may try if you like. Get you gone with
your whimpering little blind beasts."

Hugging them up in his apron, the boy
waited not one moment, but stumbled out of
the door, the tears still blinding his eyes, and
ran down the street. He went out so little
that he knew not where the slaughter-houses
were, nor how to get to them ; but he knew
vaguely that they were out at the northwest
of the town, where the country began, and
took his uncertain way thither. Further on
he asked the road, and, being told, ran on
along the waterside, while the sun blazed on

THE STABLE-BOY.

223

the pavements, and on the front walls of the
palaces.

It is a long way from the Oltramo, where
the stables were, across the bridge and along
the quays and boulevards to the Rifridi sub-
urb, where the public slaughter-houses are
situated; a long, ugly, dusty way, lying
through the hideous modern streets and vul-
gar squares, which have sprung up like
wens and tumors between the Porta al Prato
and the gates of San Gallo and of Santa
Croce.

The boy went out of the former gate, and
went onward over stones and dust, to what
is called the Ponte Rocco. All was dreary,
noisome, full of strife and squalor. There
were dirty tramway stations, heaps of refuse,
stinking soap factories, mounds of cinder and
peat, broken-down hedges, bald-faced houses,
women and children filthy and ragged, drear-
iness and ugliness as far as the eyes could
see, until they met the lovely lines of the
mountains beyond. To such a pass has
modern greed and modern waste (for the
two go ever hand-in-hand) brought this once
noble and royal road, which, bordered by
stately walls and lovely gardens, led to the
painted courts and cypress woods of the

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224

THE STABLE-BOY.

hunting-palace, where the Venus wrings the
water from her hair.

The waih'ng of the puppies was feebler and
fainter ; one of them was quite still. He
walked as fast as evef he could, feeling sick
and weak himself, not having slept and not
having eaten. The gates of the slaughter-
house stood open, guards were idling about
the dog-cart, and the lassoers were coming
out for their morning's gyrations ; poor bleat-
ing calves were 'being driven into sheds ; the
barking and howling of dogs, the bellowing
of cattle, the plaintive voices of sheep were
all mingled together in one far-off, indistinct,
terrible protest of unpitied woe. Gino went
on unobserved until he entered the building.
There he was roughly stopped and asked Us
business.

'• You took the mother last night, and they
are dying for need of her," he said, as he
opened his apron and showed the puppies.
"Will yoi? let me take them to her in the
cell ? They are such little things, only ten
days old ; they cannot see, and they will die,
and she will die too on account of her milk."'
The men to whom he pleaded brok^ into

loud, nnlv'thrl laiirrl-jfot-

*• Do you think the Macelli is a foundling

I -Uf"-^.,

THE STABLE-BOY.

225

hospital ? Get out, you and your whelps !
If you bring the order from the Communal
Palace and the money, you can take the bitch
away. A franc and a half a day for her food ;
and twelve francs the tub ; and two francs the
fine. You know that."

" But I have no money ! " he cried, " and
the pups are dying, and Stellina will die too V
Take them to her— for pity's sake, take them
to her ! If you will not let me in "

" What is that lad shrieking about ? " said
the hoarse, savage voice of the superinten-
dent. " How dare you let him through the
gates ! What does he come for ? Stop his
bellowing."

'* Oh, good sir ! kind sir, do let me take
her children to Stellina ! " cried the boy, and
tried to unfold his little tale ; but the superin-
tendent roughly bade him hold his tongue.

" Was the dog's tax paid ? " he added
sharply.

" No, sir, it never was ; but she was so
much use and so good ; and she must die,
and the puppies too, if you will not let them
go to her," said the boy, breaking down in
his prayer, and sobbing as if his heart would

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"Turn him out," said the superintendent

Sf'4\

226

THE STABLE-BOY.

curtly to his men. " We can have no maud-
lin, mewing beggars in these gates. Take
him to the Questura if he resist. Stay.
Write down his name and address. He must
be summoned for contravention."

" But they are dying ! " cried Gino, desper-
ately. The superintendent laughed, and his
men grinned. Dogs died there every day.
The only object of a dog's life was, in their
view of it, to die, and yield skin for the glove
or toy makers, and phosphates for the manu-
facturers of manure.

** Put the fool outside the gates," said the
superior officer.

They did so, first wringing out of him in
his misery and bewilderment the declaration
of who he was, whom he served, and where
he lived. He could not tear himself away
from the vicinity of Stellina.

" Bring the money and buy her out," they
had said to him. But for a poor lad, if he be
honest, to get money is an impossibility ; he
might as well try to get blood out of a stone,
water out of a brick. He had nothing in the
world except the boots and clothes in which
he stood.

lie naa not lOrgotten nis work, but ne
could not bring himself to go away and go

THE STABLE-BOY.

227

back. He went and sat down on some rough
grass near the edge of the Mugnone water,
and looked at the little things in his apron.
They were all dead but one. Their tender
and frail organisms had been unable to resist
hunger and neglect. He kept hoping that
he might see someone, do something, be able
to help her in some way. He kept the little
dead pups in his apron, and tried to warm the
one still living inside his shirt against his
Hesh. But It was growing colder and colder,
and though it felt about feebly with its lips
seeking nourishment, there was but little life
left m It. He got up and walked to and fro
up and down, here and there, stupidly, lon^-
mg for some word of help, of counsel, of as-
surance as to his dog's safety. She might be
dead now of terror, of fever, of strugrfe
agamst her fale. In this horrible place, where
nothing came except for torture and death
there was- no pity. With money, escape
could be bought, but he could no more get
money than he could root up the Baptistery
or the Apennines. '

While he held the last surviving puppy in
his breast he k\t its body and limbs twitrh •
ird It wail feebly ; he looked at it and
lat It also was dying. In anotlier few

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228

7'HE STABLE-BOY,

minutes more it was dead. He laid it with
its brothers in his apron, and folded the
coarse canvas round them. He intended to
take them home.

Half the day had dragged by ; it was now
three o'clock. The heat v^as great. There
was a high wind, and it blew the dust and
sand around him in circles.

At last he saw a man whom he knew, a
carter of forage, by name Zanobi, who had
come often to the stables, and had knawn
Stellina. The boy went to him and told him
his story ; the carter was good-hearted and
not without sympathy. Money he had none
to give, but he did what he could.

" I have a cousin who works yonder," he
said, with a gesture toward the slaughter-
houses. " After my day is done I will see
him and ask what one could do to get Stel-
lina out. Alas, I know it means money, and
much mon^y ; but perhaps, as a favor, and if
one promised to send her in the country — at
any rate I will see him, and I dare say he will
manage to show her to me. Cheer up ; they
must let two days and a half go by before they
kill the dogs or give them to the doctors. Get
you home to your stables or you will lose
your place, and what good will that do ? Go

THE STABLE-BOY.

229

Get

home now, promise me, child, and when I
have heard anything I will come round in the
evening and tell you what I know. But un-
less you will go to your stables I will do
nothing ; for what will you better Stellina by
throwing yourself out of place ? "

Then the man went on with his wagon-load
of iron rails and rods, and Gino turned away
and began to walk toward his home, knowing
that the carter spoke truly. A little spark of
hope had sprung up in his heart. Perhaps
after all she might be saved ; but the pups —
for them there was no hope. He carried
them still in his apron. He meant to bury
them, when no one was looking, under the
manger where they had been born.

He returned home over the railway embank-
ments and along the boulevards. It was a long
way, and he went slowly, for he was terribly
tired, and his stomach had long been empty.

It was five in the afternoon when he reached
the livery-stable. The stable-man who had
had to do his duty for him met him with a rain
of blows from a stick and a volley of abuse.
Gino did not resist, nor did he answer. He
said nothing and put his apron with the little
dead babes in it in a corner where no one
He drank thirstily of the bad water

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230

THE STABLE-BOY.

and resumed his work in silence. All the
carriages and coachmen were out ; the helper,
tired of his long day shut up there alone,
flung a bit of wood at his head, bade him look
sharp or he would get more, and went away.
When he was quite sure that he was gone,
Gino dug a hole under the manger in the
earth under the pavement and laid some hay
in it and then buried the puppies. When the
place was closed and the litter strevn over it,
no one could tell that the ground had ever
been disturbed.

" If she come back she will understand they
are there," he said to himself.

The rest of the day wore away. The
men and *the horses came in hot, tired, and
out of temper, after the long day with the
nuptial party in the country. There were
loud wrangling, banging, swearing, quarrel-
ling; the boy was unnoticed except that he
received now a cuff on the head, now a kick
on the shins. No one asked him anything
of Stellina ; all were in haste to unharness
and get away to their suppers. Gino did not
speak; he did his work when he was wanted,
but his head swam and his heart ached ; still
he clung to his one hope of hearing news
from the carter.

W^
^

THE STABLE-BOY,

231

The

1, and
\i the

When the horses were in their stalls and
the carriages rolled into the chancel, which
served as coach-house, and the drivers and
helper'- were on the point of going to their
evening meal, their employer came in. He
had been drinking, he was heated ; he had
lost at lotto, and he was in that humor in
which a naturally good-natured man is for the
time being a savage tyrant, and vents his ill-
humor on the first thing he sees. He caught
sight of the boy and attacked him.

" Oh, you there ! I hear you have been
out all day. I gave you leave to go out for an
hour, and you take a day ! A fine payment for
all my charity ! What are you rubbing down
that horse for.? You are not here to rub
down horses, a brat like you. Claudio asked
you ? Let Claudio do his own work. Where
is he? Gone out.? Gone out ten minutes after
he brings in his carriage .? You and he may
leave these stables to-morrow. To-morrow,
before noon, you take your week's wages and
go. You are a young scoundrel."

Gino trembled and grew white, but he said

nothing. He thought, " If Stellina come out

I will work somewhere, somehow for her.

We might get together into the country."

Yet he felt stunned ; he could not imagine

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232

THE STABLE-BOY.

that he should live anywhere except in these
stables of the old church.

His employer scolded, swore, and found
fault for many minutes more, venting his ill-
humor on men and beasts, and then went
away leaving terror and dismay behind him.
Gino alone of them all did not speak.

" Cheer up, little chap ; I will get you a
place," said an old driver who was always
kind to him in a rough way. "You know
you did wrong staying out all day. The
master can't abide idlers."
Gino did not defend himself.
An hour later he was alone as usual at
night in the stable. There was no light ex-
cept that which came from one old lantern
swinging from the high groined roof. The
doors were open to the street. In :he gloom
he saw a man's figure, and the yellow rays of
the lantern fell on the face of his friend, the
carter, Zanobi.

"Stellina!" cried the boy, as he sprang
forward breathless. The carter came across
the threshold and sat down on a pail which
was turned upside down.

"Do not fret, my poor lad," he said,
slowlv. *' I am rare snrrv fn Krmo- xrr.,, ««
better news."

THE STABLE-BOY,

233

" She is dead ! " cried Gino.

"They killed her," said Zanobi, bitterly.
" Her milk and her grief drove her wild, and
they were afraid of her, and got the vet to
declare she was mad, and they killed her at
nine o'clock in the morning, poor little brave
?oul ! No bowels of mercy in them, even for
her as a mother ! And I saw her pretty black
skin even now a-drying on a nail. Lord save
us, child, do you not take on so ! "

Gino had fallen speechless under the old
mare's body as she stood munching in her
stall.

The carter dashed ^ter on his head and
face, and shook him roughly, and he soon
rallied, or seemed to rally, and said little ex-
cept to ask again and again the details of her
death. Zanobi went away as the clock struck
ten of the night, glad that the shock had
passed off without evil effects. " He was
fond of the dog, but it was only a dog, and
he will not fret much. I will buy one for him
somewhere to-morrow," thought the good
rude man as he went away in the moonlight
between the tall ancient houses.
^ Gino was left alone. He sat still some
time, his chin resting on his hands ; at last
he got up and drank thirstily, stroked the old

^: .1

^.■'--■■^J

234

THE STABLE-BOY.

mare upon her nose, and barred the stable-
door.

By the light of the lamp he cleaned his
boots and the metal clasp of his waist-belt,
and laid them together on the lid of a corn-
bin, v/ith an old dirty mass-book which bad
been given him in his childhood.

Then he took his fork and upturned the
hay which covered the stone under which the
dead puppies lay; he raised the stone and
took them out ahd kissed them ; they were
all which was left of Stellina. He put them
in his apron and slung them round his throat.
He paused a litde while looking at the dark-
ness which hid the aisles of the church from
his sight ; close at hand the rays of the lan-
tern shone on the ribbed roof, the mutilated
angels, the wooden gates of the stalls ; there
was no sound but of the breathing of the
horses, and the hot black space was full of
their scent.

Gino crossed himself; then he fastened one
of the stable halters fast to a beam, passed
its noose round his neck, and mounted a
wooden stool on which he had sat hundreds
of evenings when his work was done, with
Stellina's little form between his knees.

THE STABLE-BOY,

235

Then he kicked the stool from under his
bare feet.

\yhen the men came in the morning, and,
finding the doors closed, with none to open
them, had them forced by smiths, they saw
Gino hanging there dead, the dead puppies
tied around his neck.

Life had been too hard for the little stable-"
boy.

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" Per rossiccia, rossiccia '1 h ; ma 'I h bel-
loccia.

" For red, yes, she is red, but she is a bie
beauty." ^

So said a man leaning on his spade among
the flax-fields, and following with his eyes the
form of a young and handsome woman who
stepped with a hthe step over the clods of
fresh-turned earth. He was an old man,
bent and black with long years of toil under
hot suns ; but he was not so old that he
could not tell a good-looking lass when he
saw one.

She was always called La Rossiccia on ac-
count of that ruddy, auburn hair which the
dead Venetian painters loved, and which she
possessed ; and she had with it the milk-
white skin which usually is its corollary : she
had a straight profile, a beautiful throat! and
a figure fit for a statue of Artemis ; she was

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240

LA ROSSICCIA.

famous for that goddess-like form on all her
country-side, and the men and youths all said
as the old laborer had done, " Rossiccia '1 h,
ma '1 h. belloccia." She was only a poor girl,
very poor, daughter of a bargeman who had
gone to and fro on the broad waters of the
Po, carrying charcoal and timber, and doing
rough work from morn till eve till he could
do it no longer, and lay bedridden. The
house she lived in was hardly more than a
hut, built up witk stones and wattles on the
edge of a great plain covered wi.ii flax,
through which the sluggish waters of a canal
passed, giving out fever heats in summer and
chilly mists in winter. Far away in the dis-
tance were the towers and doi- es and bridges
of a once great city, Ferrara, but they were
so far away that they were mere specks in the
golden haze of the horizon, and within the
walls of Ferrara she had never been.

She was by name Caterina Fallaschi, but
she was known to the few people who made
up her little world as Rossiccia ; she had
been called so ever since her babyhood, when
her auburn curls had shone in the sun as she
danced in the marsh pools or ran through

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trodden now by man or beast, though in the

LA ROSSICCIA,

241

old posting days it had been a well-known
road for travellers and the carriers of the
» .mail.

The little group of sun-baked, mist-soaked
cottages stood together among the rank grass
on the left bank of the canal, and the sluggish,
muddy waters and the white deserted road
went by them, going to forms of life of which
the occupants of these cabins knew nothing,
and never would know aught. All around
them were the flat fields, intersected by
ditches, with here and there a few pollarded
willows and lopped mulberries, and above
them all the beautiful sky ; the same blue se-
rene sky as the painters of the Lombard
schools put above their Madonnas and behind
their angels. For many months of the year
it was blue as the flax flowering under it ; and
when it was covered with silvery mist or black
with storm-cloud it was always beautiful ; not
so intense in color as the sky farther south,
but ethereal, exquisite, spiritual. It lent some-
thing of its own loveliness to the monotonous
plain, the stagnant water, the dull road; it
brought its own grace and glory even to the
squalid huts, until the house-leek on their
thatch looked gold and the bulrushes by their
water steps seemed the spears of fairy armies.

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242

LA ROSSICCIA,

There was only one blot upon it to which it
could lend no enchantment, of which its light
and air could not soften the harsh and offend-
ing lines. It was the ugly whitewashed fort
which stood in the midst of the flax-fields,
angular, ominous, sombre, suspicious, the
modern edifice which was called the Polve-
riera, and which was a blot upon the land-
scape, speaking ever of the brutal machinery
of modern war. «

These broad, level lands which unrolled
themselves to the far edge of the mountains
had seen many centuries of carnage, from the
hordes of the Huns and the Goths to the bat-
talions and squadrons of Napoleon, from the
children of Etruria flying before the march of
the Legions, to the conscripts of France rally-
ing at the voice of Desaix as the sun set on
Marengo. The black toads who lived under
the reeds had seen the young soldiers, black-
ened and burned with the smoke of Areola,
marching with weary feet along the dusty
highway where nothing now passed except
mule carts and bullock wagons ; and against
the plastered walls of the posting-house there
had leaned the matchlocks and there had
swunof the torches of free lances and of reiters
as the armies of the emperors poured over the

tA xossrcc/A.

243

Lombard plains generation after generation,
when the plough and harrow jassed over the
sites of ruined cities, and smolcing hamlets
marked the passage of the conquerors. But
of all which it had witnessed nothing had
been so ugly, so mean, and yet so deadly as
this round white fort rising naked, ominous,
out of the fields around with immeasurable
powers of destruction shut within its enceinte
yet without ignoble and unlovely, with all the
meanness and the ugliness of modern archi-
lecture.

On these plains, which had seen the splen-
dor of Francis, the brilliancy of Pescara
which had drunk the hero's blood of Bayard'
and of Gaston de Foix, which had been the
battle-field of Europe through so many ages
ever since the fires of Altala had lit up its
morning skies, this powder magazine, com-
mon and ugly as a factory, set bare and an-
gular among the frogs and flax, was an epit-
ome of that dreariness and-deadliness which
lie like a curse on modern war as on modern
peace.

It held force enough within it to blow up
into nothingness a million nf ni^n . bu- --n !'=
outer aspect it was ignoble, common, trivial,
emblem of the time which had created it. It

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244

LA ROSSI CCIA.

had been built but a few years, and the peo-
ple of the plains hated it, dreaded it, looked
askance at it as they perforce passed beneath
its sh; dow in their boats or with their mules.
It stood a perpetual menace, a standing ter-
ror amid the slow and quiet waters and
the peaceful fields. The building of it had
scarred and spoiled the earth around and
left mounds of rubble and bare earth \, here
nettles alone flourished. When it had been
completed, and the ordnance wagons and
their heavy caissons had come slowly
through the darkness of winter days to bring
it the explosives which were to be stored in
It, the escort of troopers passing slowly on
either side of the long lines of wagons, a
weight of fear and of ever-present peril fell
on the souls of the dwellers near. It was an
infernal thing set ever in their sight. For
scores of miles along those level lands the
ugly white thing could be seen, its iron con-
ducting-rods disfiguring the sky and the land*
scape, its lines of telegraph wires stretching
far and wide until they were lost in space.

But habit familiarizes with all forms of
horror ; and in a year or two after the build-
ing of it the people of the district thought
little of it except to look anxiously toward it

I^ R0SS7CC/A.

245

in hours when electric storms were drivinff
the.r clouds in masses over the plains, and
lightnmgs ran in fury from the distant Alps
to the unseen seas. They knew that if the
hghtnmg struck it they and theirs for miles
around would be hurled up to the hieh
heavens in lifeless, shattered, smoking frag- ^
ments ; the boatmen and bargees knew it,
the lab< era and carters knew it, the millers
knew . whose mill-wheels turned in the
sullen waters, the beggars knew it who sat
in the shade or the sun ; but familiarity
breeds mdifference, if not contempt, and they
lived withm reach of the imprisoned powder-
devils as the vintagers live and laugh on the
slopes beneath Vesuvius and under the
woods of Etna. Only these people of the
plams rarely laughed, because the pellagra
was constantly among them, eating away
their skins and poisoning their blood, and
ague and marsh fever often laid them low
and they worked for other men's profit, and
they had little joy in their lives, and small
ftope. The soldiers who came to guard the
powder magazine brought with them, more-
over, mto the district around a little money

and the 7f»cf of '">r«»'-^- *

-.._ — t,t oi ov^meuinig novel. Ihere

were no more than the strict number needful

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246

lA ROSSICCIA.

for the care and defence of the building, and
those few hated the service in it and their
exile from Ferrara or Mantua. But when
any oT them were off guard they sauntered to
the old post-house or to the water-mills, and
gossiped and drank and played some game
or another, and found favor invariably in the
eyes of the women. They were but ugly fel-
lows in ugly uniforms, with shaven heads and
of puny stature ; wholly unlike their forefa-
thers, who had worn their long rapiers, their
bright-colored doublets, their loose love-locks,
their plumed hats so gallantly in those old
days of free companions and musketeers, of
Marignan and of Pavia, of which the waters
rippling among the reeds and the church stee-
pies rising among the mulberries seemed still
to tell so many tales. But they v/ere men, and
better than nothing, as they brought with them
some little change, some little stimulant into
the sickly, poverty-stricken hamlet among the
flax. Yet the toilers of the soil loved them
not; the soldiers were strangers, and the Ital-
ian dreads and dislikes strangers; and the
fact that they were welcomed by their women
made them disliked by the women's husbands
and brothers and lovers. The soldiers were,
moreover, in accordance with the policy and

ZA KOSSICC/A.

*47

practice of the state, generally sent from
southern provinces, and therefore foreigners
m the s.ght of the dwellers of the pbins.
They were called the accursed Sicilians, Sici-
lian being a generic name used to denote all
who came from the lanrs whe-e oranges and
citrons were common cnSard trees, and the
evil eye was held in hom,-

The sight of the soldiers offended Rossic-'
cia more than anyone; when they bathed in
the canal, or ran races along the road, or
sauntered in their shirt-sleeves out of the sul-
len-looking gates of the depot, they were
odious to her sight ; other women might chat
with them kiss with them, drink with them •
she would do none of these things. Thev
were foreigners, and they were slaves

"Poor lads ! they cannot help themselves,"
said her father.

"They could go over seas," she answered.

Many like them did go ; to get to some
land as far away as possible, where there is
no conscription is the dream of the Italian
peasan ; his dream takes him oftentimes
where he dies miserably and prematurely in
the sands of Panama, in the swamps of the
Amazons, in the floods and fm<=i; ^f .u^
West, in the opium-hells of New York.

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LA ROSSICCIA.

The soldiers hated the place no less than
they were hated in it. The strict discipline,
the dreary inaction, the rare relaxation, and
the severe rules which the safety of the fort
demanded made life bitter and irksome to
these young men, who a little while ago had
been shepherds wandering with their flocks,
or cattle-keepers wild and free among the
myrtle, and lentiscus, or loafers in sunny
southern streets, or charcoal-burners in the
deep green cork-woods, or laborers upon the
rich volcanic soil. The exactions and con-
straints of barrack-life are always odious, but
in a powder-magazine their burden is, of ne-
cessity, much heavier, their ligatures much
more tightly drawn. No man can play tru-
ant, or infringe a rule, for he knows well
that his life an'd his comrades' lives will pay
the forfeit for any negligence, if a spark from
a pipe, be shaken out, or a match be let drop
from a careless hand. Ague and fever lurked
in all the flax and hemp fields, and floated
over the swamps in which, for sake of isola-
tion, the powaer depot had been built ; the
soldiers cooped up in it — most of them in
their second year of service — grew lean and
yellow and hollow eyed. The night sentries
suffered most, for when the moon rose death

LA ROSSICCIA.

249

rose with it. There was only one person in
the district whom the miasma never hurt : it
was Rossiccia. Her health was so perfect,
her frame so vigorous, that the deadly va-
pors swept around her and over her harm-
lessly, though she took no heed of them, and
no precaution against them, but lightly smote
with bare feet the poisonous soil, an ; sang,
joyously as she met the fever -laden lan-
guors of the wind. She had the force and
the invulnerability of the " huntress of the
moon," and from her eariiest years she had
been proof against all disease, as though her
mortal form were nourished by a goddess's
blood.

Her father was a sallow, sickly man, lying
half his days on his back on his grass mat-
tress. Her brothers were weakly youths,
though they labored like the rest among the
flax and hemp. Her mother had died years
before, in the early childhood of Rossiccia.
Whence had sprung this miracle of admira-
ble and vigorous life? No one could say.
Some gossips recollected that the mother,
when young and good-looking, had spent one
carnival time in Ferrara, and had come back
pregnant, and that there had been talk of a
noble of that town, and that there had been

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250

LA ROSSICCIA,

for awhile easier means and better food in
their cabin, and that when the child had been
born the mother had shown her to the neigh-
bors, and had said, " Rare race runs in her
veins ; and see her satin skin ! " But her pu-
tative father had never shown either anger or
jealousy, and had accepted the child with the
rest, only he had never liked her. Rossiccia
knew these suspicions of her origin, as peo-
ple do know that which intimately concerns
them, yet which is never directly told to them
in actual words ; and she flattered and
amused herself with many dreams of glory,
and her proud fancies made her cleaner and
more orderly, more careful and coquettish in
the putting on of her poor clothes, than were
the wretched women around her, whose skin
never touched water from one Easter to an-
other, and who huddled on their rags with-
out a thought of comeliness or cleanliness.
She waited for something ; she knew not
what; some favor of fortune, some change,
some miracle.

At sixteen she had married one of the
laborers, without love^ from that instinct to-
ward sexual union common to her class. She
had been very poor ; he had treated her ill.
She had had a child and buried it, and the

LA ROSSICCIA.

251

man had died of fever— all before two years
more had passed over her head. She had
gone back to live with her family, saying to
herself, " Nessun me pigliera pik " (" Nobody
shall get me again "). Her only associations
with what is called love were discomfort, quar-
rels, physical pains. With her own people
she was poor, indeed, but unmolested: she
was of use to them, and they were grateful,
m a rough, dumb, semi-conscious way : as the
oxen in the carts were when she gave them
water and wiped the dust from their hot eyes.
In the liberty and comparative contentment
which followed her return to her father she re-
turned to work at the flax-bleaching; foul-
smelling unhealthy work : for they have not
patience to let it be done by the rains and the
suns, as of old, but steep the cut stalks in acids
and whiten them over-much and over-quick-
ly, so that the strands soon rot and the linen
woven therefrom soon grows poor and ragged.
But neither the evil smells nor the evil exhala^
tions hurt her ; and she made her daily dole
somewhere or other out,of the flax, either by
field work or factory. When the flax was in
flower blue as the sky, the ugly land, level
though it was. grew beautiful, and tb'^* ^^n^^^
of its transformation sometimes touched her

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LA ROSSICCIA.

as she worked among it: a little bright
flower, gay as a forget-me-not, turning to so
many things, filling the housewives' presses,
covering the bndal couch, sheltering the bed
in labor, filling looms and warehouses and
shops, clothing gentlefolk, putting food in
poor men's mouths. She was sorry when the
blossoms faded and the stalks were cut down.
Something of her heart seemed to go out with
the dry, dull brown bundles which the acid
ate. But all these were foolish wandering
fancies, which she told to no one, The flax
helped her to her daily bread ; that was all the
outward concern she had with it.

The women of her little world were very
envious of her. They knew very well that in
their own poor squalid world she was supreme.
The black - browed, yellow - skinned soldiers
from the fort crowded around her like wasps
about a ripe peach, and the boatmen and
towing-men upon the canal went to mass at
the half-ruined lime-washed church only on
the chance of seeing her dip her fingers in
the holy- water basin or kneel down f o say
her Aves on the damp red bricks. Rossiccia
only threw them a few ungracious words, or
laughed at them rudely, showing her white
teeth; but her indifterence was more attractive

LA ROSSICCI/i.

253

than the willingness of others. And in that
ague-stricken, fever-haunted community her
health alone was an amazing and irresistible
charm. She was like a green and lusty vine
springing iithely when all the rest of the vine-
yard was tainted and sear.

She had courage, too ; that rarest cuality
on Italian soil. They had seen here ice' when
the waters flooded the fields, wading and
swimmmg to rescue the old and feeble who
had been surprised by the flood ; and once
agam, when a goaded ox had charged down
among a group of children, she had seized
him by his lowered horns and held him firm
and turned him backward, the great creature
obedient to her commands. She had no fear
in her, except one; and of that she was
ashamed and never spoke. It was a vague
shapeless, but painful fear of the Polveriera
It had been built in her childhood, and she
had watched its rising with dislike and terror
It was associated in her mind with the grr ans
of the poor oxen and mules lashed brutally as
they had brought the materials for its build-
ing, and it had destroyed a piece of waste land
which had been covered with grasses and reeds
and bryony and bearberry ; a place precious
to children and sacred to their play through

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LA ROSSICCIA.

many generations. She had vtratdied the
wild shrubs uprooted, the sods upturned, the
brambles and briars burned, the spades and
mattocks plunged into the wounded earth, and
the whole spot ruined, that the fouada :ions of
the powder fort mig ht be laid. Her play-place
had been a^ sacked to her as the waters of the
Alphaeus and the woods and lawns of Olympus
were to a child el" Greece.

In her dumb shut soul there stirred, balf-
consciously, that same sympathy with dese-
crated ind violated nature which from the
great soul of Leconte de Lisle pours forth m
articulate and conscious splendor of invective
in the imprecations of Z^ Fdret Vierge. She
knew not and could not have said what moved
her, but it was the same sentiment, though in
her immature and embryonic, fated never to
know birth. She was unlike the people round
her. She had more daring and more tender-
ness. When the children put living lizards
on the hot charcoal, or sewed their mouths up
to see the vain efforts of the little creature' m
their torture, she rescued the poor harm-
things; or, if she c:Me too late to do ^.y ; -de
their tormentors flcl the weight of he. trong
hand. " Guai ! c' h la Rossiccia ! " the anv-
ardly urchins shouted to one another whai

LA ROSSICCIA,

. 2ii

they saw her approach, if they were busy with

of her, though when they were sick, or hurt
or m trouble she would do more for them tha^
the.r own mothers would do ; and diphtheria,
and scrofula, and fever were often among
them, g,vmg them as their last cradle a yard
of the damp and dangerous earth where the
rank grass and the black crosses were so

She had watched the erection and comple-
t.on of the edifice with hatred of it in her soul
and she had seen the files of grim wagons
bnngmg ,t the deadly provisions it needed as
she might have watched a dragon fed with
human flesh. The other children had capered
for joy as the whips had cracked, and the
wheels of the ordnance wagons had creaked
andjolted; but she had turned her back on
them sullenly, thinking of the red bearberry
fru.t and the wild white roses she had been
used to gather where there now stood that
ugly, naked, frowning tower of death which
none could pass near unchallenged. So in
her womanhood the artillerymen who were
stationed .n the fort found no favor in her
Sight ; and she always wished that the tower
were not there, two miles off her own dwell-

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256

LA ROSSICCIA.

ing, with its close-packed powers of death ly-
ing unseen behind its walls. It was a scar on
the landscape, a blot on the horizon, and when
the sun set behind it and its whitewash
changed in the shadows into gray, it lost its
common sordid look and seemed to grow sin-
ister and gigantic, menacing even the sky.

Once or twice, to cure herself of her fancies,
she went close up to its base, answering the
challenge of the sentries ; not a bough or
briar or blade of^rass grew nigh ; the ground
around had all been flattened and battened
down, so that no seed could multiply upon it.
There was not a single trace of the leafy life
which once had flourished there and sheltered
the hare and the lizard and the low-nesting
birds. There were only the sullen casements,
the ugly sentry-boxes, the iron-clamped doors,
the bare walls where the plaster was peeling
from the damp and the sun. She went away
from it hating it more, thinking of the time
when here on its site she had filled her
little brown hands with berries and seen
the green locust cling to the wild oleander
blooms.

Some vague sad sense of the perpetual de-
struction of all beauty and all peace which is
forever at work under the pressure of an ar-

tificis
rant
Some
which
multij
made
univej
sight
nude J
finchei
Men I
der, sf
great
every ]
coed w
to see,
lance ir
of the
above
with th(
been, si
pie blad
weapon:
race hac
tie toth(
^'Wer
the sacr
which h

I A A'OSS/CC/A.

2S7

rttln/'T'^ ;'"""y •^^'"^ *° her, ig„o.
rant and isolated creature though she w^^

So^eperception of the hideous C;S
-etote^:^/re1S:r d3 ^

nude and stra^t^S^r^hTeretf
Men had not always used that foul gunoow

tekt tnd T- /" '"^ ^"'^^^ churchTon'ce"'
?reat and stately one) where she went n„

every holy day and feast day there wlref
coed walls, faded and milde^eOut sIh ea^J
to see where the knights rode ar each other
lance m rest, and the bowmen met th^ K
of the pikes, and the arelhltt h„ ''^'.'

S'^to'ht s^n^!^'^ " *^ ^-'^' -^ ^he bat.
"Wer« they ever like these?" she ,.k.d

had bee. begun by Vittore Pisano.

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258

LA KOLS/CCIA.

and continued by some unknown but vigor-
ous hand.

f ^ "Ay, ay," he answere^^ " lIvLy made war
just so ; all fair and open, and the good saints
striking^ for the right."

" It was better so," said Rossiccia, gravely
and with regret.

*• For sure it was better so," said the sac-
ristan ; " nowadays they mix the devil's doses
in factories and ^kill you so that no man sees
or knows whence your death comes. Some
one sets a tube a-smoking miles off you be-
hind a bank or a hedge, and you and all
round you fall dead men. You don't even
see your enemy oftentimes ; 'tis only a puff
of smoke an^ a screech; an ' the saints keep
themselves safe ' ehir J the louds. '

One day, when she was near the fort, one
.of the officers c^-jmo out of it and overtook
her.

"I have seen you here r. re than once,"
he said, with severity an. mr icion. "What
brings } ou here ? You \ ivt lo errand ? "

" No," she answered him, curtly.

" Why do you come, then ? At evening,
too ! The sentinels should arrest you."

" Arrest me if you like."

" Why do you come ? Tell me."

LA HOSSICCIA,

*' It is no business of yours "
you are not in command of me." ^"'

you Li:::^:^ %!:: 'tz ' ^'■" p-

den .round, and wil^ ve "VZ' T !""'•
self." ^ ° ^^^^ 'Jt of your-

wo;Mha..fo',ef:2j:"..''^^'<^°y-? ^-
" 1 can have you searched."

looked a^f ' '^^ ""^^ °" ''^ ''o-m and

" On what plea ? "

The young man was embarrasserl H
was aware that he hpH n« • ^"^'^rassed. He

he was dazzled by he. " "f ' '""T^'^ ^"^'
andthewhiteness'o?Lr:j^^^^^^^^
No one is allowed to be nearer ri,»
der depat than yonder stone "he said ''°"'
>ng to a block of granite ' • Thaf isTn
known to the whole district A.?v ^"

late the rule for no IzT '^ '^ y"" ^'°-

fron ignora:::Tr rSr- ''"""-^'^
not make thic m--'-- '^,'""'"^«^' y°" would
•• r ^,1." *"•>-'='> ^i your coming."
1 make no mvsterv " .,1,= .

mystery, she answered, puz-

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LA ROSSICCIA,

zled by the word, which was strange to her.
"But I come and go when I please, and the
.place is my birthplace, and I shall not ask
leave of strangers and men from foreign
towns."

" Foreign towns ! I am of Palermo."

"You are a foreigner," said Rossiccia,
with the obstinacy of the peasant and the
contempt of the Lombard for the men of the
south.

" There is only one Italy," said the soldier,
with increasing anger.

Rossiccia laughed.
. i^'The bundle of sticks is a fagot, however
tight you bind it together; it is never the
trunk of a tree."

He looked at her in astonishment.

** Where did you get your ideas ? Who
taught them to you ? "

" I have thought about things ; no one has
taught me," she answered, and then she
turned round and walked away slowly. He
hesitated ; he was deeply angry, and a little
disquieted and suspicious, but he let her go
unmolested. She was a woman of the vil-
lage ; he knew that it would be ea<=?y to learn
all about her.
iHe was annoyed by her insolence, but he

tA ROSS/CCIA. . 2gj

was moved by her beauty and her noble stat-

ZV V ^V^ °"'y ""« °^ 'he poor peoole
of the httle hamlet of Trestella. but she had

would have given to Tullia or Flavia He
was a young man, and easily excited by such
charms. Life in the PolverLra was ridious
monotonous, and wearisome. There was

r no"'dir'"' ■■" '" ^" "° ^^'-- Th-

was no diversion except a game of cards or
fee. There was little or no liberty and it
was hardly better in many ways tha^Tp^

t.me bemg m command there ; he was an il-

educated well, but scantily provided for • he
was well made in form and feature i;he
Jnder, dark, graceful as any panther'; ven
the uncouth uniform and the close-cr^pped
hair could not make him otherwise thanpkt-

m the close heat of the casemates, or plunged
naked mto the canal water to bathe and sw!m
he was beautiful with the old classic bea'ty'
winch ,s not dead, but only disguised unde';
^hc^aapeiess aumsiness of modern costume
and custom. He was by name Odone S '

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262

LA ROSSICCIA.

mestris, the latter being the name of his
mother, who had been a singer in the theatres
of the south ; nature had made him an artist,
pressure from others and indifference on his
own part had made him remain a soldier
when his term of forced service had come to
an end. He was now twenty-six, and was
favored in the service through the influence
of his father, who was attached to him, and
had always seen him from time to time. At
heart he was disinclined to submit to disci-
pline, but he was ambitious, and saw no other
way to become known than through the
army. For some trifling act of insubordina-
tion he had been punished by being sent to
the powder fort in the marshes ; a post tire-
some, dull, arduous, and of heavy responsi-
bility. All his ardent, passionate, chafing,
and galled life was put to torture there ; in
the long, slow, hot days and nights his spirit
wore itself out as an imprisoned animal wears
off its hair against the bars of its hated cage.
He had solicited a change of duty, and had
written to his father begging him to support
his prayer with the authorities ; but as yet
there had come no answer to his request, and
week drap"p"ed wearilv alonp-. each

everv

seeming emptier and longer than the others.

LA SOSSICCIA.

263

In such a moment and in such a mood the
appearance near the fort of such a woman as
Rossiccia awakened his imagination, and at-
tracted his attention as in other and fuller
- hours It might have failed to do. Her an
swers had irritated him, and he thought of
her often in the long dull night after he had
gone on h.s round for inspection, and changed

VT?^^f '^^" *^ '«'^'^ extinguished,
till! 1 h la Rossiccia; la Rossiccia '1 fe "
said the people to him when he inquired for
a tali, fair woman with auburn hair and a sil
ver dagger run through it, and they showed
him the low rush-thatched cabin a little out-
side the village where she dwelt.

It vexed him to be ignored and flouted by
a woman so poor, so illiterate, yet so indiffer-
ent; and, as always happens, irritation in-
creased the influence which she exercised
over him. A score of times he swore to him.
self to think no more of the red-haired jade •
and the mere sight of her afar off, walking
through the flax-fields with her distaff, spin-
ning as she went, or going down to the wa-
ter-side with a bronze pitcher balanced on
her head overwhelmed all his resolutions

and stimulated a cTiv^Ar^^ .*"*-^ — •

, . i-'.---. xiitw a passion, iie

bitterly repented that he had blamed her for

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264

LA ROSSICCIA,

cbming near the fort ; and he would have for-
feited his grade and epaulettes to have per-
suaded her to return. She never did so. She
knew that nothing could give her back the
wild oleander shrubs and the white briar
roses of her old playground.

One morning he saw her beating linen
where a little space of water was shut off by
logs of wood for washing purposes. The
other women were beating and splashing and
shouting and laughing clamorously, but she
alone worked in silence, her fine arms shining
like marble in the sun against the yellow wa-
ter and the moss-grown logs. He approached
the group and bandied light words with the
other people, but she took no heed of him ;
she did not look off her work.

" He is well to look at," murmured one of
the women to her; but Rossiccia answered
with contempt :

" These soldiers all strut like the red par-
tridges in pairing-time, but they are nothing
but slaves when all is said."

♦* Men are slaves to a beautiful woman,
whether they are soldiers or civilians," said
Odone as he lingered among the osiers
gray and yellow in the heat.

Rossiccia appeared as though she did not

LA ROSSICCIA.

26$

hear, and beat her linen more rudely and
loudly ; it was not linen, indeed, it was only
the hempen cloth of which her own shifts and
her men's shirts were made.

He seated himself on a stone and watched
her. He had unbuttoned his tunic,' and,
though his limbs were disfigured by the mili-
tary uniform, he was a graceful and pictu-
resque figure as he leaned his head on his
hand and smoked, jesting with the others, but
lookmg only at her.

Rossiccia took no notice of him, but fin-
ished her labor, threw the wet shirts she had
wrung out in a lightly-twisted mass on her
shoulder, and went homeward.

"A sullen wench," said Palmestris, angrily,
to one of the other women.

"Nay, she is good-natured," the woman
answered, "but she hates the sight of sol-
diers ; 'tis to her as the red dog is to the
white one."

" Why ? " he asked, interested and curiou'
•• Eh, for no reason I know of," she replied.
" But yon fort was built on a bit of waste land
which she was fond of as a child, and the
sight of all you who dwell in it is to her like
a week of rain when the flax flowers/'

" She cannot hate it more than we do,"

^ •'•ill

,!*' ...

266

LA ROSSICCIA.

said the young man, with a laugh and a sigh.
" If she suppose that we can enjoy ourselves,
she must think a rat happy in a wire trap."

" Is it as bad as that ? " said the woman.
** At least you get your victuals free and cer-
tain."

To her this seemed the one supreme felic-
ity of life : a few beans, a little maize-flour, a
few drops of oil were all she got, and those
were often wanting, and sometimes she had
to make her bread with husks and grass-
seeds.

Odone did not hear her; he was following
with his eyes the now distant figure of Ros-
siccia, tall and darJ- against the pale gray
lights of the hot vapors which rose in visible
mist from the flax-fields.

"She has no damo?" he asked, wondering-
ly. "A woman without a lover is as strange
and stupid a thing as an unfertilized vine."

"'Tis open for you," said the woman, with
a grin. *' Try, and you will taste that little
lance she wears jn her hair."

*' You tempt me," he answered.

He was tempted without her suggestion.
The insolence and the indifference of Rossic-
cia stimulated the admiration which her physi-
cal strength and beauty had aroused in him.

LA ROSSICCIA.

267

She seemed to look down on him, as if he
were some mere insect which crept on the
masonry of the powder magazine. He was
above her and beyond her in every way : in
blood, in knowledge, in culture, in circum-
stances. She could not scrawl her own
name or read a line. He had passed difficult
examinations with credit, and expected in
time to pass into the staff. He had studied
for pleasure as well as for necessity, and his
natural talent was refined by culture. But
he felt that he was nothing in her sight ex-
cept a mere vassal of the Government.

One night as the sun set in August he met
her on the bank by the water-side, on the
narrow towing-path which the horses used.
She had a rope passed over her shoulders,
and was doing horses' work, pulling a boat up
stream. Her feet were bare as they trod
heavily the hot, dusty grass ; her throat was
bare, he saw the blue veins in it throb and
swell under the pressure of the rope, and her
breasts under h ;»- thin cotton bodice rise and
fall in the stress of the labor like two waves.
The boat she towed was constantly checked
in its coiirse by the reeds and water-weeds

P"rowino- in fhf^ liaif_ef.. ,^„^„«. „,„4. ^ii_

C5 o - -'•• -•- •^l^s3.^ix. wuici ; Liie One

man in it aided its progress as well as he

I'ti

\ 'iSl

; u. I

268

LA ROSSICCIA.

could with a long pole, which he used alte^
nately to part the tangle of the weeds and to
keep the boat off the bank. Odone stood in
her way as she came, and kept his place pur-
posely.

'* That is not work for a woman," he said.

*' Yes, it is," said Rossiccia, curtly. " Wom-
en are beasts of burden."

" Why do you do it ? '^ he asked.

*' That is no affair of yours. One makes
pence as one can. Stand aside ! "

He kept his place.

'* Ho, you ! " he cried, to the man in the
boat "Come up and take the tow-rope
and give me the pole. It is a fine sight
to see you leaning your lazy length down
there ! "

The man looked up and laughed.

** She is a strong wench. She wants no-
body to take up cudgels for her."

"• Will you come out of that boat } " said
Odone, imperiously.

^ " Not I," said the man ; and he put his
pipe in his mouth.

Odone, without any words, leaped from
the bank into the boat, struck the pipe out
of the other's lips, caught him by the waist,
and tossed him, with no gentle hand, up

LA ROSSICCIA.

269

onto the towing-path. The man fell heavily
on the dusty grass.

" Give him the rope," Odone cried to her
as the other got sullenly and sulkily upon his
feet.

Rossiccia stood still, with her brown eyes
wide open.

Then, despite herself, she laughed.
" You are an impudent meddler ! What
is it to you what others do? Say, Renato,
are you hurt ? " she asked of the crestfallen
boatman, who was swearing every foul oath
m his repertory.

" Give him the rope," said Odone.
" That I shall not do. He has hired me "
she answered; and she bent her back and
stramed her shoulders, and drew the boat
slowly through the reeds. Odone was forced
to use the pole to keep it from grinding
against the bank; but when he had disen-
gaged it he sprang ashore and seized the
rope as it passed over her shoulders.

" I have said that you shall not do it ' "
he swore, with a furious oath. His hands
touched her skin and bruised it.

" Eh } You are no master of mine ! How
dare you-^how dare von ? " <:h#> ^r.\A «..vu
equal violence, trying to force the rope out

*;„;

*«'%

1|»

270

ZA ROSSICCIA.

of his hands. The struggle was fierce, and
the whole strength and volition of each of
them wereput into it. The boatman Renato,
who had risen onto his feet, and was behind
the soldier, seeing how wholly engrossed he
was in his conflict with the woman, whipped
out of his waistband the narrow sharp knife,
called a cook's knife, which almost all men of
the populace carry, and, coming close up to
Odone, struck at him with it under the shoul-
der-blade. But I^ossiccia, who saw the
movement, intercepted it; she let go the
rope with one hand, and caught the knife by
the blade before it could pierce her adver-
sary's tunic. In the brief collision the knife
cut her badly ere Odone was aware that she
was touched. The other man, seeing her
blood flow, flung his knife into the water and
fled, thinking that he had stabbed one or
other of them. Odone and she, sobered and
subdued, stood apart from each other, breath-
ing heavily, the rope still lying upon her
shoulders.

'* You are wounded ! " he cried with emo-
tion as he saw the red gash on her palm : he
was wholly unaware of Renato's attempt.
" Did I do it with the rope ? " be cried, in
poignant amlction at what he thought was the

LA RC. 'CC/A.

271

consequence of his own violence. " Oh, for-
give me !— for pity's sake forgive me ! I was
mad ; I knew not what I did ! "

•' What come you meddling here for ? " she
said, roughly, while the pain of the cut flesh
made her color come and go despite herself.
*' Let me alone, or I shall do you a mischief.
I am not patient. Because you keep guard
over a cask of powder, you deem yourself a
fine gentleman who can lay the law down to
everybody "

She stopped, breathless from the struggle
with him, and sick, despite herself, from the
smart and pain of the wound, round which
she had hastily wrapped her skirt.

He looked in her face with so strange an
expression in his own that it disturbed and
daunted her.

"You say I am mad," he said, abruptly,
" Well, I may be ; but it is you who have
made me so. Ever since that day I saw you
by the fort I have been bewitched; and to
see you doing mule's work for that lazy ras-
cal made me beside myself. I love you—
dear God ! how I love you ! "

"Madonna mia ! " exclaimed Rossiccia,

and there were smrn inr-i-orliii.>x '-nA •

tience in her tone ; no emotion, no pleasure,

1«n.,

-\W\

KC;

272

LA ROSSfCCIA.

no gratitude. -You will make no fool of
me ! " she added, sternly. " I know that
ranting, rancid stuff, and I am never duped
by it. Get you gone ! You have done harm
enough for one day."

She tried to pass him while the rope lay
between them like a gray snake, and the
abandoned boat floated motionless among
the weeds. But he saw the blood from her
hand soaking through the cotton stuff which
enwrapped it, and .heeded not her rude, un-
feeling words, b^t fell on his knees on the
lonely path and lasped her skirts.

" I have hurt you in the flesh," he mur-
mured, '*but you have wounded me in the
heart and stricken my very soul I do not
dupe you. I do not lie to you. I only love
you, as God lives."

Something in the vibration of his voice
made her eyes look down on his unwillingly,
involuntarily drawn to his gaze by same mag'
netic force. Suddenly all her face grew hot ;
she believed, she understood, almost she was
conquered.

But she pushed him backward with her un-
wounded hand and disengaged herself from
his hold.

** l\ it be true I do not want to hear, I do

i// ItOSS/CC/.t.

-7i

not choose to hear ; men are nothing to me
and soId,ers are less than men. Let me go"
With a quick, unforeseen movement he
ran dcvvn the bank and springing ir^o the
abandoned boat, ferried herself ove , the
opposite bank.

He had always borne himself well both as
a soL.er and a man. Her gibe was an in-
justice as well as an absurdity, and, thrown
at h.m m a moment when his passions were
at a white heat, it shocked, stung, chilled
embittered him. ^ '

'• I am a fool, and neglect my duty for a
thankless fury," he said in his teeth ; and
without looking b.ck, he walked away toward
the fort, which was three miles off across the
plains.

When it was dusk that day Rossiccia re-

turned to the spot where the boat had been

left, and sat down in the reeds and waited.

i>he had bound her hand up, but it was more

and more painful as the flesh stiffened, and it

enraged her because it would prevent her

from working until it should heal. She

waited to see the man who had done it ; she

divined that he would come at dark to look

lor his boat and fnl-p .> ^ v

,.i . ^ ^^ awaj. i\o one was

likely to steal it ; it was well known on the

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274

LA HOSSICCIA.

water, and could not be appropriated without
the risk of recognition.

She reckoned rightly : the boat was there
with its load of rank grass. She sat down
above it on the dusty bank and let her hot
feet dangle in the water; the frogs were
croaking, the night-crickets were humming;
big water-beetles boomed through the air;
the lights at the night nets of the fishermen
glowed here and there on the surface of the
water ; all was <^ark and still, for there was
no moon

She waited some time ; the bats flew round
her now and then, brushing her hair with
their wings. At last she heard a cautious
step of unshod feet treading the stones in
the shallow bed of the stream ; she could see
the outline of a figure by the faint luminance
of the stars. " Is that you, Renato ? " she
cried, as she slipped down from the bank and
stood erect between him and his boat rocking
among the sedges.

He slunk back, afraid ; but she held him by
the shoulder with her unwounded arm.

" I saw what you tried to do," she said,
contemptuously. " You tried to stab from
behind. You are a knave."

** I wac in ni\» rlfYlit " e-jJrl fKo »n»»M tirifU av

— fT t.-ris SIS SOT issrixii vruivt bxxiw sziotl rtribtt ^.."4.-

LA ROSSICCIA.

27S

citement and no shame. " The brute had in-
sulted me— thrown me ; why did you inter-
fere ? If you got hurt you deserved it Why
did you stop my knife ? "

'' You were a knave," she repeated ; " you
did not dare to fight."

" Only fools fight," said Renato. - What
is steel for, save to help one on the sly ? And
you made me throw my good little knife Into
the water-a good little knife which cost me
three francs in the cutlers' quarter in Ferrara
Itself! "

"I did wrong; I ought to have kept it to
sht your throat," she replied, still holding him
by the shoulder.

" What harm did I do you > You say you
hate those soldiers, and this one is a viper
from the south."

Rossiccia was silent.

A sudden suspicion occurred to the mind
of the other, who was old, sly, and mali-
cious.

" Did you tell him ? " he asked.
"Not I. You are one of us, and he is
what he is."

" And you will not tell ? "

" No, I will not ; so long as you keep the

-.t-»1_ \,\J lUJtil,

•«A

276

ZA ROSSTCCIA.

"Why do you say that? ts he your
damo, then ? "

" I have no damo. But right is right."

" Right is right, and first of all rights one
pays an offence off as one can. What do
you wait for here ? "

" Only to tell you that. Keep your peace
with him, and I will keep my silence."

Renato laughed a little impudently.

" You may say what you like, and there
are plenty of cutlers' stalls, or a box of
matches mayhap would serve him out best."

*' Well, I have warned you to leave him
alone," said Rossiccia, sternly, little believing
in his threats, for he was known to be of
small courage. He was an ugly little old
man. born in the village, and thought of poor
repute in it, though she, having known him
from her childhood, was glad to do any work
for him when he asked her. She left him
and went home, ill at ease. Renato was not
a good enemy, and that secret thrust which
she had seen, haunted her like the remem-
brance of a nightmare.

It served the suit of Odone better than all
his own eloquence. When the moon rode
high th^t night, a shield of gold in the star-
studded heavens, she lying sleepless on her

J~1 JIOSS/CC/A.

rude bed of dried rushes, heard a voice with
the accent of the south in it, singing beneath
her open shutter a love-lay of Sicily.

E«ci dalUi flnestra, core ingrato,
Core di sasso, ed anima criidele.
Non mi fate raorire appassionato ;
Ditemi di venir, caro il mio bene.
Se ro! dice di s!, il mio core brilla j
Ss mi dice di no, muore di doglia.'

The words were simple, but the melody to
which they were sung was rich and passion-
ate and fervid, with all the fires of the land of
lava.

Rossiccia kept her face buried among the
dry rushes and made no sign ; but her heart
softened, and her mouth smiled in the dark.

A httle later on, the song changed to one
of trmmph; the Sicilian, despised, derided,
and rejected, became her master. She was
conquered and took pride in her own subjec-
tton as women do, and the proudest women
most abjectly.

On her side it was one of those great pas.
s.ons whtch, at their onset resisted and con-
temned, become the sole ruler of the life i„

which J-h^v a— » -

*k \ V "^ «*ruuseaj and on his, al-

though begotten of the senses, it had some

278

LA ROSSICCIA,

higher sentiment in it than mere physical ad-
miration.

He had suffered and thought and studied

and his passions and his affections were

strong ; the stronger because they had been

starved in his youth. He felt that in this

woman, though to others she was only a

peasant with unshod feet and empty brain,

and lips locked by ignorance, and a temper

violent from excess of feeling, there was some-

thing which made her akin to the better side

of his nature.

He had little liberty, but what he had he
gave to her ; they met by the solitary banks
of the stream or where the maize grew as tall
as they, or at night he came under her window
and she undid the bolts of the door noiselessly
while her people slept. But it was very sel-
dom that he got leave of absence ; the num-
ber was few at the fort, and the responsibility
was great. ^

The difficulty and the rarity of their meet-
mg gave it a zest and sweetness such as are
never known to security. All day long she
went about her rude tasks with a joyous bird
singing, as it were, forever in her breast; and
he, grave, taciturn, and solitary, to his fellows
thought only of her as he paced the rounds of

LA /iOSS/CC/A.

279

the dreary and dangerous place to which he
was confined.

They loved each other greatly, and too
well to part or to obey the dictation ofcir-
cu instance.

''After all, who has any authority over us >
And we wrong no one," they said to each
other.

There was no jealous wife on his side, no
suspicious husband on hers, no conjugal jeal-
ousies to be set up in arms between them and
bar therr meeting. They hurt no one by their
surrender to their passion. They continued
to meet as constantly as they could, and as
secretly Mystery is the very heart of the
rose of love ; pulled open in the light of day,
the love, like the rose, is spoiled and drops.
The obligation to keep their meeting secret
lent to their attachment that glamour and that
charm which can never accompany sentiments
laid bare to others. Something from it has
fled, never to return, when a third knows the
joy of two.

He was but as a splinter of wood in the
great grinding wheel of modern military ser-
vice, and she was of no more account on earth

than a speck of Hiiotof o ki,j_ _r . ,

I- „. t>uiaucOi grass in the

towing-path ; but they loved each other with

'■J

|(t!..,

**i

:'%

28o

HA ROSSICCJA.

the old Italian passion, tlie passion of Paolo
and Francesca. of Romeo and Juliet, of Gi-
nevra and Rondinelli, which still is alive as a
devouring flame in the land, and which ever
and^ again sends the stiletto or the dagger
straight through breast and bone. Per i: amove
is the cause of crime written against the names
of half the toilers in the gangs of the galley-
slaves of Central and Southern Italy. Far'
I'amore is still to gentle and to simple the
supreme pursuit; perfection, and perfume of
life. Jealousy, cruel as the grave, and ca-
price, inconsistent as the breeze, may be its
companions ; but it is lord of life and of death.
To meet, to be all in all to each other, to
pass through the rest of the hateful hours only
that the rising moon might show them heaven
in each other's eyes, this was all for which
either lived as completely as the Angelica and
Medoro of the amorous poet whose ink was
held for him by a Cupid when he dwelt with-
in the walls of that Ferrara which lay red in
the setting sun beyond the fields of flax. The
sear, chill, shallow, selfish, modern temper
may have slain Eros elsewhere, and torn his
wings in strips to stretch them under the lens
of the object-glass, but in Italy he still lives,
child of the stars and the moonbeams, com-

LA ROSSICCIA.

38t

panion of the nightingales, sweet singer to the
nver-reeds, and if his soft hand close upon a
blade of steel, he is only lovelier because also
terrible.

One night when he was bidding her fare-
well Odone said to her. "To-morrow and
lor five to-morrows I cannot leave the fort at
night, nay, scarce by day; my captain goes
at daybreak on leave to Sardinia, and I am
left in command. It will be utterly impossi-
ble for me to forsake my post But we can-
not live SIX days and nights asunder. Will
you come to me there ? "

" I hate the fort ; it is cruel, it is danger-
ous ; It is frightful to look at and to think of,
dear ! " she answered, with her old hatred and
fear of it rising up in her, and finding no words
strong enough to speak her abhorrence of it.

" Nay, I have loved it ever since I saw you
under its pale walls," he replied. "You
would make it beautiful if you came to it."

" But no woman can come to it ; nor can
any stranger."

"That is the rule, no doubt; but there
might be a way. Say, love, to please me,
would you have courage to come thither if I
found the way > It is a grewsome spot"

•• Go yonder ! "

■^

■ '■'A

/'u-'i

': I -,

282

/.A KOSS/CC/A.

The blood left her cheeks at the mere
thought. She was a woman, strong in body
and in will ; but she was of quick imagination,
and the place was horrible to her, in fact and
in fancy.

•' If there were no other way for us to meet ? "
he asked, his lips touching, as he spoke, the
"whiteness of her throat.

She waited a moment, drawing her breath
swiftly and painfully.

" Nay, to hell itself would I go, for that ! "
she answered at length, with the intensity of
a great unspeakable emotion in the words.
" But you talk idly, beloved one," she added.
" A woman cannot come thither ; and could I
come, it would disgrace you in your soldiers'
eyes."

" Were it known— yes ; but if you would
come as a lad, better still, as a conscript, it
need be never known ; you would be seen as
my friend, or as one on business sent ; and I
could give you the clothes and tell you the
password. See, dear, it would be quite easy.
I am left in command ; I can open the gates
and close them. No one of the men will see
anything strange. There will be no risk what-
ever, and we shall have sweet hours, if all too
few ; and in greater surety still than here."

LA HOSSICCIA,

283

"Surety! In that place?"

"Ah ! you are afraid of the place itself?
VVell, I can understand that it has terrors ;
that it seems like sJeeping on the very roof
of hell, like kissing the live mouth of a can-
non as it belches, but "

" I am not afraid in that way." she said
quickly. " What ! afraid for myself when you
he there alone so many a night ? Dear soul,
you should not think such shame of me."

" I hardly did think it, my golden-eyed
honess. But if not that, what kind of fear
then?"

" I have always feared it. It grew up there,
a sickly-looking, hideous, cruel thing of brick
and stone and iron, where the yellow broom
and the dog-roses and the St. Joseph's nose-
gays used to grow; and it . full of evil
stuff to lay low gallant lads and the lovers and
brothers and fathers of women. And I have
heard my uncles tell of war ; and it is the
foul fiend of war which lives shut up there-
yes ; so I am afraid."

He laughed in that familiarity with peril
which breeds contempt of it

" It is a foui nend safe in irons, unless we of

our own will lf>t h«»ii oi'«- " 1^^ --i-'J « 1

"And, in truth, it is not as a fiend that we

284

LA ROSS/CC/A.

view the powder : explosives are as much in
need for defence as for attack ; these plains
have been .oftentimes ravaged by many a foe.
and may be so again ; then the death which
sleeps under our hand will leap up like a wak-
mg lion and roar out, ' Thus far shalt thou go,
and no farther.' "

'• I know," she answered, impatiendy, as her
eyes looked across to the shadow of the fort,
now dark against the moon, round, dark,
sinister, like those numberless, nameless
towers which rise without history or tradition
under the cork woods and by the rocky coasts
of Sardinia. It was impossible for her to put
into words the dread she felt, which was alto-
gether alien to either timidity or suspicion.

"Then, if you are not afraid you will
come ? " he urged, with a man s narrow limiu-
tion to the personal

" I said not so," she answered, with em-
barrassment " For you to come to me, that
IS as it should be : as it hath ever been be-
twixt men and women ; but for me to seek

you *'

" But I cannot leave, in common honor ! "
he cried, passionately. " Any personal risk
would I^ run of court-martial, of dismissal, of
anything ; but to leave a post of danger which

tjl KOSSKC/A.

2S5

is confided to me-that I cannot do without
shame. I aught happened and I were absent,
what would men say of such a cur > "

nights are long ; the priests say that they did
suffice for the making of the world ; but we
shall live through them."

"Then if you think so. you have no love
for me ! he cried, with the eternal rebuke of
the lover who captiously asks for proof upon
proof of that which he knows as certainly
as he knows that the earth is under his feet.
I hink of me alone yonder, all alone ; for the
comradeship which once was welcome is only
■rksome, tedious, intolerable now ;-six days
and s,x nights without a word, a glance, a
touch !-,t IS a foretaste of death. Is not life
short enough, that we should give away twelve
times twelve hours to silence-to solitude-to

say All that time we might have been happy,
and we were not ! ' You are cruel ! Wha! is
■t I ask of you ? You do things more un-
womanly when you throw the towing-rope
above your breast. Well, I love you better
than you love me. I will do what is shame-
ful, disloyal, treacherous ; I v.-ill leave the fort
w..en t..e ,.,oon is iiigh, and .ome hither as I

»'!

'!»

Mn^

286

LA ROSSICCIA,

have come to-night, and if any ill happen
while L am away, I can but kill myself upon
your body; you will know that I loved you
then ! V

His face was pale as marble in his passion.
His eyes flashed and glanced. The passion
of his words vibrated through her, as some
chords of music will thrill through the impris-
oned souls of animals. She caught his hands
to her bosom, and kissed them many times.

" No, no ! I will come," she said to him.
" After all, it matters nothing for me, if yoq
wish it so. Tell me how ; tell me when. You
must never do what would shame you for
me."

That day he brought her a conscript's suit,
the ugly, coarse, poor linen clothes which are
given to the soldiers in summer, with the rude
gaiters, the leathern belt, and the peaked cap
of the service. She hid them under the sack-
ing and dry rushes of her bed, and tried them
on when night had fallen and the little house
was still. She had only a small cracked
piece of a mirror and the cotton wick of an
oil-lamp wherewith to view herself; but she
smiled as she saw how straight and comely
her limbs looked, and how tall and fine she
stood in this bojjs jerkin and breeches, with

LA ROSSICCIA,

287

her hair tucked up i„ a great coil upon her
lie .so that the cap hid it from sight. She
who had never heard of Rosalind, looked
Rosalind to the life, even though her clothes
were so rude and mean.

It was a dark night, for the young moon
had set and clouds obscured the stars. The
heat was great, so great that darkness seemed
rather to mcrease than to dispel it '-he who
was used to go barefoot and clad according to
season could scarcely make her way withlhe
weight of the gaiters and boots, and she did •

migh betray her sex. The familiar paths,
the plams known to her from her infancy, the
outhnes so engraven on her mind by lone as-
sociation that she could trace them in the
dark, seemed no longer the same, because her
own personality seemed the same no more.
She got over the parched and dusty soil
clumsily, slowly, with a gait wholly unlike her
usual fleet and careless tread; but although
she felt as if some leaden hand plucked her
back every step as she went, she drew near-

little light which he had promised her to set
by one of the loopholes, and wh.Vh «narfe'"H
starlike in the darkness. ' "^"^ ''^

111, j

1 1

•HI-
'S*. '

!!•

;;*!:
'ft

988

LA ROSSICCIA.

As she approached it her eyes, grown used
to the dark, could trace the ugly pale building
on its solitary mound. It was a dread tryst-
ing-place, a grim bower for love ; but she
pressed onward with a sensation which she
could not have analyzed, half fear, half tri-
umph over fear. She went straight up to
the bolted iron gates; the sentry, with a
sharp rattle of his musket, summoned the
shadow, which alone he saw, to stand and
^ give the password, i She gave it. and added
* as her lover had bade her, that she had come
there to see the officer left in command.
" Pass in," said the sentry, satisfied. The
soldier at the gates asked her more ques-
tions and held up a lantern to look at her,
but he saw only another young soldier like
himself, as he thought, and after awhile she
got through the doors and within the build-
ing. Odone met her as he would have met
a brother or a comrade, drew her within his
own chamber and closed the door.

At dawn he unbarred the gates himself and
she went homeward. No one who saw her
among the sleepy and sullen men kept on
watch-duty thought for a moment that she
was other than what she looked, a conscript,
a little taller, brighter, more elastic in move-

LA ROSSICCIA.

289

ment than are most of the wretched youths
dragged from their homes under the colors,
bhe went over the ground backward to her
village as silently as a vapor wreath moved
over the river-bed. None of her own people
knew of her absence ; their maize paste and
bread was ready as usual for them, on their
bare breakfast board ; and when her father's'^
querulous, piping voice demanded his pipe
and drop of coffee, both were there. With
such complete security and immunity had the
midnight tryst been kept, that, when night
came agam and the church-bells tolled the
hour over the marshes she put on her boy's
clothes as a matter of course, and took her
way again toward the fort.

This second night was radiant from the
stars, so that the moon was little missed, but
her passage over the marsh and the flat
fields was more open to sight, were any there
to see. The country was so lonely that she
met no one; but, unseen by her, the man
Kenato, who was cutting reeds-stolen reeds
-half-way to his waist in stagnant water,
looked by chance at this figure of a young
soldier flitting through the shadows, and
looked again and again more curiously and
closely, and said to himself:

*t^l

290

LA ROSSICCIA,

" May an apoplexy take me ! If that lad
were not a lad and a soldier, I should say he
was Rossiccia's self; that is the turn of her
head, though the hair looks cropped ; that
is the skim of her foot, only it is clog^^ed bv
the leather." ^^ ^

His curiosity and malice being aroused, he
. wandered along through the osiers and wil-
lows, keeping her in sight for half a mile or
so, until he saw her strike straight across the
flat fields toward ,the place of the powder
fort. He was stupid, but he was cunning;
he grinned as he dragged himself through
the sedges : " Two turtle-doves nesting on
a cask of gunpowder, pretty dears, pretty
dears ! " He grinned again, and stood still
with his sickle in his hand, gnawing the black
stumn of his pipe.

If it had been a man of their own plains
he would have seen no harm in it ; but a
stranger, a Sicilian, a man from over-seas,
where fire-mountains burned all the year
round, and the men, made of fire too, slit
your throat did you but brush their plough-
share with your heel !— that was different,
that was against every law of the soil, written
and unwritten.

Whom could he tell ? Her father ? he was

LA ROSSICCIA,

291

a bedridden gaby. Ker brothers ? they were
children who looked to her for the bread
they ate. Her neighbors ? 'twas no business
of theirs ; they would wag their heads and
laugh.

No matter : they should not sleep in peace
much longer, he promised himself, as he
worked among the dusky willow rods, watrh-
ing ever and again the lights hung out by
the fishermen against their nets for fear the
fishers should perceive his pile of cut reeds
and rods. The ignorant mind is slow to
take in an idea, still slower to trace out a
plan ; but it is tenacious of its resentment,
and holds fast to its gratification of ^ruds^e
and reprisal. ^

Thus his little, narrow, malignant brain
worked on as well as it was able at one
thought: the lovers who were there within
those gates of hell. Not that he had any amo-
rous jealousy or envy ; he was too hungry
and too poor a creature to* cherish passion,
but he hated the man who had flung him up
out of his own boat onto the sand like a dead
mole, and he would have liked to come be-
tween that scornful foreigner and his good
lu^K. r^.x .c was rare gooQ iuck to have the
Rossiccia iov^ganza; though he himself was

;?>•,

lit

292

LA ROSS/CCIA,

too concerned with picking and stealing and
scrapmg halfpence together to have much
sense or sight left in him for women, he knew
that she was good to look at, and to love
white -skinned, strong -limbed, full - breasted
wench that she was, drawing a barge along
as easily as other women would draw a child's
go-cart. Had he not seen her do it ? Had
she not done it for him ? And now she was
a fine foreign soldier's mistress, and went to
her popinjay amoi^g his casks and kegs of
death ! An angry sense of envy, which was
only not jealousy because he was too old and
too indifferent from long absorption in the
sorriest means of existence, stirred in him as
he splashed among the reeds and looked
across at the round pale tower of the powder
magazine. The form of Rossiccia was no
longer visible between the building and the

water.

He chewed his pipe-stem moodily and
thought ugly thoughts ; and as a little shrew
swam by him, stoned it because he was will-
ing to hurt something.

It pleased him to think that if he could only
get mside that building, a few sparks from
his pipe would send these . lovers into the

blackness

"ptiness of that vast vault

^A /tOSSICClA.

•29i

which over-arched the stars. But he could
not get in, he knew that : neither he nor his
pipe could ever pass those ceaselessly march-
Jng sentries who paced beneath the walls
Me bent down again and began to cut more
reeds : it did not matter to him where he cut
them, none of the osier-beds were his, he
took them as he took the quail or the teal,'
when and wherever he found them. If he
could have driven his knife into the stranger
who had affronted him, and seen his blood
How, he would have been immediately ap-
peased, and would have borne no ill-will later
on ; but, having been balked of his just re-
venge by Rossiccia's intervention, his hatred
had grown and deepened and strengthened
and added to it was the sense of injustice
which rankles in one who has been denied
his right. He pondered long with such dull
wits as he possessed, sharpened by envy and
mahce and natural cunning ; and, first stack-
ing his stolen osiers in h. boat and taking
them down stream to his cabin on the bank
unperceived, he cleaned the river mud off
himself and procured a lift on a market cart
going at dawn to the city with a load of
watermelons and num^i'ip-

He had taken a few coins which he had

li. I

m
u

'1%

'I 'I

294

lA ROSSICCIA.

kept hidden in a hole in the thatch, and
shook them in his closed hand in his pocket,
as he jolted on among the smooth and the
wrinkled globes of the green frnits.

" It will buy a fine big box of matches,"
he thought with a chuckle. "Or a nice
black slow worm with a fiery eye in her
head. Or a good little knife like the one
that rusts in the myd."

He felt proud of his omnipotence. He was
only an ugly old n;ian, with only a few pence,
and a hut made of rushes and wattles, but his
powers for evil made him feel like a king.
As the wagon rolled through the slumbrousi
grass-grown streets of Ferrara he looked at
the opening shops with a cruel smile of con-
tentment and coming vengeance.

He lingered all day in the town, unable to
decide what he would buy. But at the last
he chose a rough provincial thing, a long
taper-like slow-match and a blasting fusee
in connection with it ; a match which would
creep, creep, creep gingerly and securely for
half an hour, until it would reach the fuse
and scatter ruin round it. It was sold to him
in one of the low dens of the town by a
maker of fireworks of a common sort, who

no questions and might be safely

LA ROSSICCIA.

295

trusted to forget the sale. Cleopatra never
clasped her asp more fondly than he hugged
the ugly coil which he carried away from the
shop.

"My good little knife, my good little
knife ! " he said to himself as he drifted out
ofFerrara on one of the barges ; "she will
be sorry she made me put it in the water ! "
He had been a stonemason in his early
manhood, and he had watched the building of
the powder-magazine with a shrewd eye not-
ing where the work was scamped, and soft
or porous stone used and ill-baked bricks.
He knew its weak points, and knew that if a
man on moonless nights could conceal him-
self often enough and long enough to have
time for the operation, he could easily pen-
etrate through the masonry at the rear of
the building. The idea pleased him, and he
dwelt on it fondly. He liked to think of
all those men pluming themselves on their
safety, while he, when the moon was young,
should be working away in the rank grass
and coarse sand to send them all to per-
dition.

Eh ! the Sicilian had tossed him up onto
the bank like a dead cat and had said nev^r
a word in excuse, and she, the jade -hom he

lil

€.

!?!

2^6

LA ROSSICCIA.

had always admrred and praised, had treated

me trt °^ "■''^"^ ''^"^^"> '>«^ foot.

Where would they be when, some moonlight
mght he should sit in the sedges and walh

feel the whole sol.d ground shake and crack ?

Eh! ,t was a fine thing to have been a
workmg-mason, and to have known the
tncks of the trade, and to have a few pence
to spend .n powder ! He was so elated at his
own capacity and cunning that he hugged the
fuse to h,s breast 4nd kissed it beforf he put
.t safely away in a covered corner of his belt

i he absent commander prolonged his ab-

thTfl '"/^:^'"'^' '°^'h to --eturn to the fort in
the flax-fields, and Odone commanding in his
stead remamed tied to his dangerous duty.

Ihe canicular heats were at their greatest
and many of the soldiers were ill wkh fever
or dysentery, or the vague, nameless nausea
and weakness brought on by life on these
ands m summer time. The earth around
the powder depot was less healthy than when
the bilberry and bearberry had sucked up the
moisture of the soil ; and the miasma mists
were heavy and poisonous where the slue-
gish waters crept beneath the duckweed and
vallisnena.

LA HOSSICCIA.

297

His days were overfilled and anxious and
arduous ; he had no one to share the burden
of responsibility with him; the young man
under him in command was laid low in the
marsh fever, and he could not quit the fort for
an hour.

Only when the sun set and the welcome
coolness of night descended on the plains did
he throw off his heavy load of care and sur-
render himself to the consolations of a love
which had had as yet no time to wane or pall,
but which by mystery and difficulty and rarity
retained the first ecstatic charm of its earliest
hours.

Whether the men knew or guessed aught
he could not be sure, but if they did they
were discreet and sympathetic; there was no
one who cared or dared to wonder at the fre-
quent visits of the strange young soldier, when
the heavens were full of stars, and the owls
hootmg above the gray thickets of the willow- '
rods.

They were as much alone in those hours be-
fore the dawn as though they had been un-
companioned in a virgin world. The old man
Renato, who alone knew of their trysts, said
nothing; he was intent on his own work:
chuckling to himself as he drilled arid chipped,

2gf

LA /fOSS/CClA.

unseen, unheard, and in the dark, to think
what fiery splendor would celebrate their
union, ere the moon should again have leisure
to grow large. ^

One night when morning was quite near
Rossiccia was awake while her lover slept.
He had taken some touch of fever himself; he
was weak and chilly and over-tired ; the in-
sidious poison of the soil had crept into his
veins and stolen from his sinews their elas-
ticity and force.

He slept the heavy dreaming sleep of incipi-
ent illness, and she watched him, leaning her
elbow on his pillow and her cheek upon her
hand, listening for his every breath and pray-
ing over him all the dim imperfect prayers she
knew.

The low light of a safety-lamp burned by
the narrow campbed. The small high win-
dow was open to the air. The heat was
great. The only sound in the stillness was
the croaking of frogs in the distant water and
the monotonous tread of the sentinel pacing
without under the wall. All was so still that
she could hea the beating of her own heart,
and his, as thoL, . :he -ame life moved them
both. She did no- sar a fin^- r lest she should

that it was near

Kuel

LA ROSSICCIA.

299

daybreak, and that soon she must ai ise and
go. lest in the light of day she should be seen
and recognized.

She was about to try and rise without dis-
turbinrr him when her anxious ear was caught
by a slight crackling noise, very faint, such
as might be caused by the moving of an insect
among dry grasses ; but there was no grass
here in this barren labyrinth of brick and
stone, and such a sound could mean but one
thing— that thing against which all the senses
of the dwellers in it were forever on the stretch
and strain by night and day.

Her first impulse was to awaken Odone.
But as she looked at him by the rays of the
lamp, the extreme fatigue and the deep slum-
ber expressed in his attitude and on his feat-
ures so appealed to her for repose that she
resisted her impulse and turned the rays of
the lamp from him. Besides, she thought,
what was there that she could not go and see
as well as he ? She took the keys, which lay
beside him. and the lantern, and went softly
out into the passage. She could hear the
tread of the patrol on the stone floor of the
corridor and the step of the sentinel on the
ground without below the walls. They were
pacing to and fro with even steps, evidently

■f

300

LA JROSSJCCIA.

dreaming of no danger nigh. It might be her
fancy that there was any :\arm near ; the Httle
sound might be the rattle of a mouse between
the masonry, so she told herself; but she took
her lantern and the keys and stole on tiptoe
to the great doors of the adjacent powder-
rooms. Strong as she was, it cost her a
mighty effort to turn them in the wards and
then to turn the hinges in their sockets. The
impenetrable darkness of the great vaulted
windowless chambers alone met her view;
close by, the outlihes of barrels of melinite
and other explosives were visible in the rays
of the lantern ; there was no sound at all.

She had been dreaming, she thought ; she
began to draw the doors toward her again,
afraid lest the patrol should pass and find her
there. But at that moment her ear was
caught again by the tiny crackle as of a mov-
ing insect. It came from the left-hand side of
the chamber. She set down her lantern with-
out the door and went in among the dread
merchandise of death, her bare feet falling
noiseless on the stone.

Far away against the right-hand wall she
saw a httle spark, no bigger than the light of
a fire-fly when one sparkled among the flax,
-ut a uiortal terror gripped her heart as with

LA ROSSICCIA.

301

a hand of steel. She knew what such a
spark in such a place meant for every living
thuig within the walls and without them for
niany a mile. Not an instant of time did she
lose m hesitation, nor did a sound escape
irom her l.ps ; a superhuman power entered
mto her veins, her limbs, her whole being.
With a hghtnmg flash of knowledge she reat
ized that the man whom she loved, the sol-
diers under his command, the villagers whom
she had ived with from babyhood, her father
■ lying helpless in his bed, one and all, de-
pended on her and her alone to save them
from a sudden and ghastly end, by violence
and fire let loose upon them in the hush and
peace of night. Without a second's pause
she sprang onto the barrel nearest her and
leaped f.om it to another, and another, and
another heedless of the imprisoned terror
which her feet touched, and in a few swift
bounds she reached the place where the
spark glittered : the small red. cruel dot of
fire made by a slowmatch. She stooped and
saw the fuse, long, black, sinuous, made of
the common blasting powder which the man
Renato had bought in the gunner's shop in

rerrara. Shp ^allo■^,^ "^u^ ...:.i.- j ,

. &■" "'" "ii-Kcu worm 01

death m her hands, clutching the burning

1 ■.

302

LA ROSSICCIA.

spot, and held it high above her head : then
slowly, lest a spark might fall, retraced her
steps through the dark, walking on the heads
of the barrels. The match quickened with
the motion; the flame brightened ; it burned
her hands, the heat bit and gnawed through
the flesh of her fingers ; in any moment it
might reach the powder in the fuse and blast
her into space, and bury her in the ruins of
the building which she tried to save. But
she did not loosen her hold nor falter on her
way ; the fire caug^ht the linen sleeve of the
conscript's shirt which she wore, and hissed
up her wrists, and in little rings and tongues
of flame circled and licked her arms ; but she
continued to bear it erect above her head
and out of the doors of the powder-room into
the naked safety of the stone corridor, and
there cast it down into a tank of cold water
which was kept there ever filled in case of
peril, and the fiery snake sank harmless in
the flood, hissing and spitting on the liquid
surface of the hostile element.

It was barely in time : her charred and tor-
tured hands had lost all power to hold any-
thing, their sinews and muscles glowed like
red-hot wires, the hempen sleeves were burn-

inrr frk K^*» -r^lU-^

LA ROSSICCIA.

303

She staggered down the passage-way to
her lover's room, trying to hide her burning
clothes from him as he arose, startled out of
his sleep, only half awake, and but half con-
scious.

" Dear love, it is nothing," she said, faintly.
" Be not afraid ; the match is out. Only go
you, if you can, and close the doors ; I could
not And if they find them open they will
blame you."

By sunset on the morrow she was dead.
Her beautiful arms were like two blackened
branches of a burnt tree. But she died lean-
ing upon her lover's breast, the soldier's and
the people of the village weeping round her
bed ; and that fiery death in the full height of
a perfect passion was a lovelier portion than
life, lonely, obscure, abandoned, and forgot-
ten could have been. She had broken off
the perfect flower of life in its full bud. So
best.

T eeth Like Pearls t

s A COMMON EXPRESSION. The Way to obtain it, use
Dyer's Arnicated Tooth Paste, fragrant and delicious.
Try it. Druggists keen it.

S.. i^lTfi&c Sb CO., Ii£0£^7ScISA.U,